My Grandmother’s Sticky Kitchen

Summer vacation for me, as a kid, meant a week or two staying at my Grandmother’s house. I don’t mean just me, no, my mother and sister also went. My grandmother spent part of the summer off elsewhere with friends, and going to stay at a house in Staten Island for two weeks, instead of an apartment in Manhattan, was a vacation.

I guess. Sort of.

Whatever, this point is we spent a week or two there every year. And every year we had the same ritual:

Arrive, put bags places, talk to the neighbors and arrange going shopping (having no car and being Staten Island don’t mix great, at least in the 80s when public transit there was worse than it is now), scrub the kitchen.

Please know, my grandmother wasn’t some terrible, horrible, woman who couldn’t keep her house nice. I would never slander her in that way.

But everything in her kitchen was … sticky.

You would walk in and your feet would go slorp slorp as you walked. Utensils, if left on the counter, were oddly sticky when you went to pick them up. The placemats stuck to the table hard enough that you kinda had to work to get them to peel free.

Imagine it. You’re a kid, you don’t know the why of any of this yet, but you know this room where you are supposed to prepare and eat food, is just permanently sticky. You don’t want to touch things (cabinets were fine, fridge wasn’t sticky, but still!).

The whole room was oddly disconcerting to me. It was later, too, but doubly so when I was a kid. It felt like a trap, or a secret no one was privy too. There was mystery there. A terrible mystery no one actually wanted to solve.

There was, of course, no real big mystery involved.

There were just reasons. Some of them not great, understand, but reasons nonetheless.

Vinyl tile had replaced real tile decades ago, in the kitchen. The old table, nice solid wood, had been replaced, also many many years prior, with a laminate table that had a plastic-y top.

My grandmother, however, refused to change how she cleaned and cared for her kitchen. So she waxed the floor after mopping. Same with the table.

Witness – the birth of sticky!

Now you might ask why the counters were sticky a lot of the time. I think she waxed them, too. I assume she did. But the counters were the same laminate type surface they had always been in that house, so she never should have waxed them in the first place. Maybe she ran on instinct or repetition.

We explained this to all her, obviously. More than once. And she’d go “Yeah…” and shrug. And keep cleaning things the way she always had.

She wasn’t, before you ask, senile or even approaching it. She volunteered for a decade or two more at hospitals and was in great shape and sharp as a tack, she just didn’t want to bother changing a routine she knew.

And the sticky didn’t seem to bother her.

What could you do? Well, basically when anyone in the family went by her place, if you were there long enough to do it you would clean, and de-stickify some stuff and just sigh and move on, and yes I realize this might’ve been her scamming her kids and grandkids into cleaning her kitchen for her.

Even if you accept that you wax tile floors to make them pretty, keep them cleaner longer, and make them into hazardous surfaces that are slippery (see waxing something that is supposed to be wax doesn’t leave it sticky the same, I swear)

Part of me is tempted to ask why she would do that and still put in the work to make it sticky in the first place, why not just clean it and leave it alone, but then I have to factor in one other thing: She had a strange, hysterical, sense of humor.

Leaving us all in a lurch about the Sticky Kitchen, and quietly playing dumb, and making us cope with it, could have very well been on purpose. But you have to admire the commitment to the bit.

Even if we showed up unannounced, the kitchen was sticky. She didn’t just do it knowing someone was coming over.

Was it on purpose as some sort of long prank? Possibly, if I’m honest.

Was it just a refusal to change a habit, and damn the consequences? Also possible.

I’ll sadly never know, and when I did ask, years ago before she passed, she just shrugged and walked away.

But we were in her kitchen when she did.

So really? She slorp slorp‘d away.