The Osterizer That Stayed

Digital art collage by Stella Kalaw

My Osterizer blender sounds like a helicopter preparing for liftoff. It was white back in 1976. Now it’s yellowed to the colour of old piano keys. The base is heavy, substantial, built when things were built to last.

I unwrapped it at my first wedding—a seventies flower-child affair in my parents’ backyard, where I wore an ivory dress made by a seamstress friend of my mother’s and had flowers in my hair. The blender outlasted that marriage.

These days, I mostly use the Osterizer to emulsify soup. But somewhere along the way of fifty years of blending, it became a vessel for all the versions of myself I’ve been.

In my twenties, I thought progress meant checking boxes: graduation, career, marriage, house. I was twenty-one when the priest asked if we understood marriage was a lifelong commitment. I said yes, understanding nothing. The blender understood lifelong better than I did.

It witnessed everything that followed. Those early years typing university research papers at the kitchen table, hunting and pecking on a borrowed electric typewriter, the blender whirring in the background as I made late-night smoothies. The dilapidated fixer-upper we bought with a loan from his parents. My certainty about what marriage meant: a blender, a couch on credit, white wedding dishes, and happily ever after.

By twenty-eight, I’d become chief of staff to a federal cabinet minister, complete with a secretary to do my typing and my own pass to the Parliamentary Restaurant. I was succeeding by every conventional measure of progress, and the marriage was slowly failing.

When it was over, I put the wedding dress in a green garbage bag and left it at Goodwill. The wedding photos went in the trash. The blender stayed, which now seems like the smartest decision I made that whole first go-round.

In my thirties, I started over. Took my half of the house sale, bought another fixer-upper, and married again. This second marriage has now lasted thirty-eight good years.

My husband Jonathan has learned to leave the kitchen when I use the blender—the noise makes conversation impossible. After all these years, I’m still stunned by how I feel about him. The butterflies are gone, but what replaced them is better: absolute trust, quiet constant love. I marvel at this daily—that I got it right the second time.

In my forties, two children arrived, and the blender shifted to baby food and pancakes. Saturday mornings: crack an egg, add milk, flour, a splash of vanilla. The blender would turn it all into batter, poured onto a hot griddle in perfect circles—breakfast for two small humans who drowned everything in maple syrup and laughed at their father’s corny jokes. This was the gorgeous chaos of family life.

In my fifties, my mother died. The woman who had survived forced labour in Germany during the war, who carried secrets and trauma I never fully understood. The blender kept blending.

Some days I’d turn it on just to fill the kitchen with its roar, the sound drowning out the silence she left behind. But what really haunted me wasn’t her silence—it was mine. Why had I never asked? Maybe I sensed that her survival depended on not telling. Or maybe I was just too busy living my own life to see she was carrying hers. All those stories she took with her; the Osterizer’s noise was easier to bear than the quiet that held everything we never said.

In my sixties, retirement came, and my father gave me what my mother couldn't: stories. Long conversations in his final years about the war, about who they were before they became my parents. I was too busy writing it all down to use the blender much and even considered buying a quieter one, but by then I understood: some noise doesn’t matter much. My father handed me the pieces she'd kept hidden, and I finally understood who I am and what my story is.

Now I’m seventy. I turn off the blender, and in the silence, I hear Jonathan’s voice from the next room, talking on a business call. He’s using his professional tone, the one that’s slightly lower, more measured than when he talks to me. I know he is taking notes in that cramped handwriting that only he can read. The late afternoon light coming through the kitchen window catches the steam from the hot soup rising from the blender, and I realize this is what contentment looks like: standing in a home I love, using my old blender, holding the stories I’ve uncovered, listening to a man whose voice has become the soundtrack to the best parts of my life. It all makes me smile.

My Osterizer will always sound like a helicopter. These days, I hear applause—for making it through, for a career I loved, for a marriage that’s lasted, for the children we launched into this world, for this version of myself that knows what happiness sounds like.

I rinse the blender, dry it, put it back in its spot in a cupboard. Tomorrow I’ll use it again, and it will sound exactly the same.

And it will still work.

This story was inspired by something Jill Martin wrote that made me smile. KitchenAide Mixer of Feelings.