By Melissa Hart

What’s inside your cupboard?

I’m not talking about the dozens of mugs that are stacked precariously that will come tumbling down with one wrong move. I’m asking what is on the inside of your cupboard door.

Do you have anything taped up on the inside of the door? A photo? A recipe? A note?

My mom used the inside of her cupboard doors as a place to put commonly used recipes or reminders. Over by the baking center she had her bread recipe neatly written in marker on a piece of white poster board so she could easily access it throughout the winter when she decided the family needed some homemade bread.

The cupboard by the coffee maker had several items taped to it. The solution for getting the skunk smell out of a dog, a list of foods and their caloric values and a funny column by her favorite columnist, Erma Bombeck.

At one time, and it may still be there, she had a note from my dad. We had gone shopping on a Saturday, and we arrived home to a long note on the kitchen table detailing his day on the farm. He described how hard he had worked and how hungry he was and how disappointed he felt when he came in the house to find no one there. It was written with my dad’s dramatic flair highlighting his unique undertones of humor. That was one of his better notes, worthy of the inside cupboard door.

I was reminded of this as I was making my third cup of coffee and realized I followed in my mom’s footsteps with notes on the inside my cupboard door. The door over the coffee maker has a list of how much the garden produced and what was in the freezer from 2001 and 2004. There’s also a list of meal options so if I needed ideas, I could check the list. There is a drawing by my daughter from her elementary years and a certificate of limited lifetime warranty of some baking dishes purchased on a date at a store that I have no recollection of.

The cupboard door over the baking center has a recipe for homemade rolls and a very faded recipe card for cinnamon syrup that was pulled from a Country Woman magazine in the late 1980s.

Are we the only ones who do this? Please tell me my mom and I aren’t alone in our crazy cupboard “blogs.”

While some people document their lives in journals and scrapbooks, if you want to find the important recipes, sentimental notes, children’s art and essential warranty info, look for them in the heart of the home, fastened with faded tape and aged scraps of paper inside the doors of our kitchen cupboards.