Slow Living
There was a period when I stopped cooking. Not entirely — we ate — but the cooking became perfunctory. The kitchen light was wrong. The fluorescent panel that had been there since we moved in bathed the room in a flat, greenish brightness that made everything look slightly less appetizing. It made cooking feel like a task to complete rather than something to do.
I replaced it with two kitchen pendant lights over the island, on a separate dimmer from the undercabinet strips. The difference was immediate enough that my husband — who has never commented on a lighting change in twenty-five years of marriage — looked up from the counter and said simply: this is much better.
I cooked something complicated that week for the first time in months. The pendants at about 50 percent over the island, the undercabinet lights doing the task work, the overhead off. The kitchen felt, for the first time, like a room I wanted to be in for four hours.
A beautiful, warmly lit kitchen tells you that cooking is an act worth attention. A harsh, functional one tells you to get it done. The pendant was not an extravagance. It was the thing that gave me back cooking.