An Excerpt From a Free Writing Exercise I Did in Creative Writing

The most vivid memory of my first kitchen [that I can clearly remember] is the checkerboard kitchen floor, black and white squares covering the tiny room we cooked in. Years later my father said it was really hard to keep clean.
Everything in that kitchen was ancient. The stove was gas-run, with what I was told was a small but awesome griddle to make homemade tortillas on. I had to take taller people's word for it, as I was too short to see above the stove. My eye level hit about the height of the oven door.
The lone window above the sink let in the California sun. The rays touched the countertops that were always kept spik and span by my parents. They would never leave dishes in the sink overnight.
The refrigerator was of the one door variety, not the double door steel monstrosity we have now. The fridge we had then was the smaller white kind that people who were renting their house had. Our first house was so small that when we opened the fridge door, it covered the doorway to my parents bedroom.
There was a smaller room off of the already small kitchen. It held the washer and dryer my grandparents had brought over on a truck. That room held no significance to me, except the one year the Easter Bunny hid my basket between the wedge of the machines and the wall.