Ten minutes to write. Less time to read.

My mother was a pragmatist when it came to stocking her kitchen with gadgets. She saw absolutely no reason to have a particular tool for one specific reason if she could figure out a way to get the job done by using something she already owned. If you’ll pardon the pun, she never pared her kitchen accessories to make room for new ones.

A butter knife was a handy screwdriver; a large water glass made a dandy rolling pin; and a dinner plate was often commandeered into action as a cutting board. For a whisk, Mother simply took one beater from her portable electric mixer and applied elbow grease. For a colander, she put the food that needed draining into a pot and positioned the lid at an angle to allow the liquid to seep into the sink as she held the covered pot upside down.

In spite of Mother’s creativity when it came to an egg slicer, a garlic press, or a lemon zester, she had one weakness. She could not throw out containers, even when their contents had been eaten or discarded long ago. Consequently, her drawers and cupboards held an astounding array of cottage cheese containers, soft butter tubs, berry baskets, jam jars, concentrated orange juice cans, and plastic bags. I must admit Mother found a use for many of these things. The jam jars reveled in new life as old-fashioned glasses while the juice cans lived in the refrigerator and held the grease that was left when we fried bacon. I doubt the juice cans reveled.

When Mother died, I was left with the task of dismantling not only her quirky kitchen but also the other parts of her life, quirky and sane. She has been gone a little over eight years now, but whenever I see jam jars or berry baskets, I think of her.