Counter-Intelligence: Clean Your Surfaces

For June, you shall graduate — from schools, and winter and shutters — and move to summer. Your closet is too dense, your books too many, your shoes and socks too heavy, the shelves in your fridge too full of the equipment of making the best of winter food.

By the new sun, everything wants attention, the windows, the sills, your forearms, your pillows. It is time, metaphorically and literally, to clean your counters. Back to their bones, back to their very basics.

There are things on your kitchen counter that do not like being interrupted. There are things on your counter with special passports, three and four passports, to prove they belong there. There are things on your counter, oils and soaps and mortars and odd shaped bowls and collections of rubber bands, keys, and closures and snaps, of bay leaves and bay rum — things that have never imagined being anywhere else.

Get them all off, all of them, at least for a moment. Clean their tops and sides and bottoms, with any luck toss a few, and put them all in a holding box, awaiting review. Some of them will look very put out, the counter is their place, their plaza, their mall, their view.

Now clean the counter, first for debris but then deeply, with soap and cleaner and cloth, up the back wall of each. If part of the counter is a woodblock, then lightly sand out any burns or stains and finish with a mineral oil or finish oil. You want a completely fresh canvas, with not a thing on it. You are starting a new season, with new foods and fresh herbs, with new hopes and new tasks. Let the counter sit for a moment, alone. Enjoy the open space.

To restock the counter, you will choose afresh what needs to be there. Does the honey need the counter and will you choose it less if it moves to the cupboard? The garlic looks lovely, its cloves stacked but in truth, it prefers being out of the light. There are many oils and vinegars and some are precious and some are barely hanging on. But, in truth, only the olive oil works every day.

Be selective, and unsentimental. And realize, whoever does not return to the counter, it is not banishment. They will get a hundred single chances for review and may yet make it back to the good seats, on appearances alone. By the middle of fall, you will likely have to do this again.

Put these on your now clean counter!