The Kitchen Calendar: Circling Dates through the Circle of Life

Like most families, we have a calendar hanging in our kitchen. In our home, however, it’s not merely a kitchen calendar. It’s The Kitchen Calendar. Capital T, capital K, capital C, and worthy of respect. Not a freebie giveaway calendar from the local bank, nor one of the lovely, gift-quality calendars with photographic images of beautiful places around the world or witty, inspiring quotes.  This is a serious calendar, almost a foot and a half wide by two feet high, covering nearly half of the door where it hangs. Where our calendar is concerned, size does matter: the bigger the pages, the bigger the boxes, and the more info you can squish into each date of the year without having to squint too hard to read tiny scribbles. When we had our outdated kitchen remodeled last year, one of the first things I fretted over was where to hang The Kitchen Calendar, since its longtime perch inside a closet door had been demolished.

Growing up, my kids – and my husband and I, too – knew to check The Kitchen Calendar every morning for reminders of what was going on and where we were all supposed to be on any given day. With an often hectic household of five busy people, The Kitchen Calendar was always my safety measure. The instant an event was scheduled, an invitation arrived, or a paper was due, I’d write it on the calendar. Once it was memorialized there, I could let that thought go out of my brain, which often had way too many tabs open at once, without fear of forgetting it. (And don’t get me started on Post It notes; there were many days when, having to crisscross our town for three kids whose afterschool sports and activities often overlapped, I would drive with a Post It note on my steering wheel, marked with the drop-off and pickup times and locations so as not to mistakenly leave one of them behind somewhere!) Even after the advent of electronic and online calendars, I continued to mark everything down in writing on the huge calendar that remained, both figuratively and literally, in the center of our home.

As the saying goes, what’s said in jest is meant in earnest, and we would all joke that if it’s not inscribed on The Kitchen Calendar, it isn’t really going to happen. Medical visits and dental appointments, new jobs and new school years, baptisms and birthdays, graduations, anniversaries, school plays, work meetings, deadlines, dinner dates, play dates, bill payment due dates, holidays, parties, vacations and business trips, concerts, trash pickups, car inspections, service calls, township events – you name it; if it has happened or is supposed to happen, it has a place somewhere in a crowded box on The Kitchen Calendar. The really important dates warrant a bold circle – sometimes even a few exclamation points – so they stand out at a glance. And my now-grown kids rib me about what they consider my morbid habit of noting the anniversaries of when certain loved ones passed away. But those dates, too, are ones that I don’t want to forget. Perhaps that is my ongoing tribute to the memory of those we miss and it reminds me to pause and think of them with a mix of sadness and a smile on the date when we last said farewell.

Glancing at all those circled dates recently, I reflected on how they are really markers along the way through the circle of life. Days filled with joy, with excitement, with expectation, with worry. Relaxing days, stressful days, fun days, busy days. Days when we began something new, let go of something that ended, set goals for which to strive, or tended to something mundane. Days we’ll remember forever and perhaps some days we’d rather forget. I look back sometimes at certain milestone dates and marvel at all that has transpired between then and now. I look ahead at boldly circled dates in the future and yearn to see what the future brings.

One of the woeful ironies that I still mourn, particularly since I became a writer, is the fact that I never maintained a diary. I used to, many moons ago when I was much younger, until an unwelcome breach of privacy and the subsequent destruction of my cherished diary made me lose faith in the sanctity of being able to write down my personal thoughts. I tried a few times, but never kept a traditional diary of my own again, finding that the days would often pass way too quickly to stop and take the time to write about them anyway. But as the years went by, I eventually realized an unexpected, valuable advantage of the articles I’d written about places I’d been, people I’d met, and events that happened in the community, as well as the household history that was transcribed on each page of The Kitchen Calendar. Together, those articles and calendars have created what is actually a journal for myself and for my family, reminding me of where we were and what we were doing way back when.

I’ve been purchasing the exact same calendar for years now. Each fall, as the current year starts to wind down and the new year approaches, I make my annual trek to Staples to get the newly minted, pristine calendar with nothing but twelve months of blank spaces that will soon be chock-full of details. Within a day, I’ve transferred all the dates and reminders for the coming months that I’ve been stockpiling on the infamous Post It notes, and hung The Kitchen Calendar for the new year behind the one that will soon be retired. Once I turn the page from December to January, I don’t discard them. They have all been saved – a thick stack of what are essentially oversized diaries about each day in the lives of our family, our friends, and the community around us.

Note to self: Keep circling those dates. Surround yourself with a circle of those you love. Embrace the circle of life.