No Kitchen

Moving on up.

SueAnn was an overly cute, wannabe flight attendant, rawly divorced, with enough money in savings to weather six months at the bottom of the pay scale.

She made it through training, but our airline folded. She joined a major airline, where she started at the bottom again but is living large.

SueAnn was active in 4H and entered canned peaches, cakes and pies in the county fair.

Her growing up years were lived in the part of Florida that is heavily agricultural, but she has grown past her past and is becoming a real town girl.

There was a short “trainer marriage” that gave her mother something to fuss about and her father something to worry about.

The groom was past his “best by” date when she found him.

Alumni of her first airline hold quarterly luncheons which she attends. Many are retired but a larger number of them are still flying for other airlines.

She considers selling her car. She regularly uses a car service or public transportation to get around. The idea of being “without a way to go” drives her father nuts, so ingrained is he with independence.

SueAnn passed her mobile phone around the table to show pictures of her new condo.

While viewing the cell phone pictures, one of the girls shrieked and passed the cell around in the opposite direction. Where’s the kitchen?

There is no kitchen. “Nobody cooks anymore,” SueAnn confided as if it was a secret of things to come.

“What if you met a man who likes biscuits in the mornings?” asked one of the women.

SueAnn replied, “I’d send him back to his mother.” They all hooted.

Instead of a kitchen, there is a closet sized “galley” that includes a small sink, a stand alone counter top freezer, a shiny appliance that includes a microwave, a food dehydrator and small convectiom toaster oven in the same package.

A balcony appears to be large enough for two or three chairs, but there are no chairs, just raised beds. She raises minigardens of things that do not take up much space.

She buys ready-to-cook meals at the grocery store and orders frozen meals packed in dry ice. Those are stored in her three cubic foot freezer. She waves away the fact that convenience foods are loaded with sodium and empty calories.

She has a few years before having to worry about that.

This might be how things will become, but we’ve had people who don’t know how to cook for ages anyway.

Plus, there are guys lined up ready to take her out to dinner.

joenphillips@yahoo.com