The first thing I bought for my new home, in a new place, in a new country, was not a bed.
It was not a sofa, or a table, or even a lamp. My belongings had not yet arrived by ship from Germany, and I was told they would take another few months. The rooms were entirely empty. There were no pictures on the walls, no books on the shelves, no soft place to collapse at the end of the day.
But what unsettled me most was the empty kitchen.
So the first thing I bought was a KitchenAid.
I had sold my last one in Germany because of the voltage. It had been with me for years, sturdy and beloved, the color of turquoise sea glass. When I put it up for sale on Facebook, an American woman who had recently moved to Berlin responded within minutes. She offered me twice the price. She said she had to have that one because the color reminded her of home.
And there I was, on the other side of the ocean, in my own empty kitchen, buying the same one.
Same color.
Different voltage.
A KitchenAid made for America.
It looked almost ceremonial there, gleaming and upright in the emptiness, as if it had arrived ahead of me to announce something I was not yet brave enough to say:
This will be a home.
This will be our home.
My mother had one. My grandmother had one. In my parents’ kitchen, an army-green KitchenAid still stands proudly on the counter, the one my grandmother gave them nearly sixty years ago. It has never broken. I imagine all it has held: cake batter, bread dough, whipped cream, frosting, celebration, grief, ordinary hunger, Sunday sweetness.
The meals it helped make were not just meals.
They were evidence of a life being gathered.
So when I moved into my own place, before comfort, before furniture, before anything looked settled, I bought the object that had always meant home to me.
I placed it in the kitchen and began to dream forward.
I imagined the people who would one day come through my door. The friends who would become family. The neighbors who would stay too long at the table. The future tribe I had not yet met. I imagined flour on the counter, music playing, someone laughing from the next room, someone asking if they could help, someone arriving hungry and leaving held.
I imagined cakes cooling, bread rising, sauces simmering, children sneaking tastes, stories unfolding between bites.
The kitchen was empty, but the mixer made it feel inhabited by possibility.
I know now that I was not really buying an appliance.
I was buying a beginning.
Before the bed, before the sofa, before the rest of my life had arrived, I bought the thing that said:
One day, this room will be filled with people I love.
And it would begin here.
With the KitchenAid.