**This writing is a part of my Abydos Writing Workshop that I am currently enrolled in!
My Childhood Home - the KITCHEN episode
In Childress, Texas at the address of 1011 Avenue L NW - stands my childhood home. My mother still lives in this house and it has changed very little since I first moved away to college in 1982. I moved into this house in 1967 with my mom, dad, and little brother. We celebrated my brother's 2nd birthday the month that we moved into this house. We had moved from Denver, Colorado to this small west Texas town. I do not remember this - but have pictures in a scrapbook that records this family historic event!
In the blueprinting exercise, I drew the layout of my childhood home as I listened to Judd's sing "Flies on the butter". A wave of nostalgia for my childhood flood my memories. As I listed the rooms in my childhood home and begin writing incidents, adventures, and stories that had occurred in each of the rooms - I recalled a crazy, traumatic (on my part) and hysterical story that happened in our kitchen!
I learned to cook in my childhood home kitchen at a very young age. I was a baker, cook, and took on the role of the family chef, feeding my family of four. I was in all kinds of food contests and competitions with 4-H; even winning the State 4-H Food Show competition in 1982 which led to my "claim to fame" in 4-H. My specialty was bread. I baked all kinds of bread. This incident involved me mixing a yeast dough with a hand mixer. I had proofed the yeast but was rushing my steps. I had not let the yeast properly "bloom" when I had added the yeasty-water to my flour bowl. As I was mixing the dough, I leaned my face down deep into the bowl to smell if the yeast was active. Being the connoisseur of bread making, I knew I could smell if the yeast was active. I failed to have pulled back by shoulder-length hair, as all good chefs were trained to do, and my hair fell down into the bowl with the flour, yeast, and water. Within mere seconds, my hair was caught up by the blades of the mixer along with the bowl's content and I had an actively spinning mixer beating whelps into my skull! Luckily, (and by the grace of the good Lord above) I had the instinct to sling back my body, head, and attached mixer quickly pulling the cord out from the electrical outlet. I was stunned, hurting and quite embarrassed.
I will never forget the look on my mother's face as I walked in the living room with her on the couch and I'm covered in gooey bread dough and a hand mixer is attached to my head with my hair wound ever so tightly in the blades of the mixer. After her laughing episode and a quick trip to the kitchen to see the results of this disaster, she began the process of unraveling my hair out of the beaters of the mixer. It seemed to take hours to untangle my hair from the mixer's beaters and then I had to soak & shampoo my hair several times to get the sticky yeast out of the strands of my hair. It was a very messy situation. There were swollen patches on the side of my head for several days but no hair loss and I did survive to tell the story! Needless to say, no bread was baked that day!
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