A favorite memory from West Virginia—

A family get-together at our house, extra people standing around, I clutched the glass pan with my hot pads and took the baked pie from the oven. But when I lifted it high to peer at the crust’s underside, to inspect for brownness, a chunk of the pie slid out and crashed down on a stove burner, into the drip pan. We could only scream with laughter and scoop up the steaming-hot clods and shoo-fly goo.

Another favorite, though the trouble wasn’t pie—

Jennifer’d collected waffle irons for the big breakfast. (The gang coming to West Virginia had swollen.) She had three plugged in. We were flocked around the table, blabbing away, when someone noticed smoke drifting from one of the outlets. Thinking the kitchen might be on fire, we leaped out of our chairs and ran out onto the porch.

Then I remembered the baby. The baby! Get the baby! She was still in the house, in her high chair.

The things that go wrong are what we recall years after, slapping our sides.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
Friday Afternoon En route to cousin Ann’s house, relegated to the back seat, I keep clicking clicking, trying to catch perfectly son and mother. But what’s more telling is the visit. We’re met by Ann at her front door. I’m right behind Mom, ready to grab at her if she topples. “Now you’re a spring chicken!” I announce to Ann, because it’s Mom, not Ann, who’s 95. Spring chicken relatively speaking, I mean, because being around somebody ancient makes you suddenly young. I’m practically a chick today. But right away Ann, her round eyes a-sparkle, lets out that she’s 91. Oh my. Paulson and I didn’t realize. As we navigate past her, what else flies out of her mouth is a Bible verse, although for all I know it’s Ben Franklin. “They that compare themselves among themselves are not wise,” she chortles. Paulson loves it. I love it. We laugh and laugh. She’s always been a wit. Clearly she still has it in her. Circumlocution is such a bear at this age. An outing like this, away from the ...
Read more
Image
Cookies for Barry, part 2   Because when I asked him whether people ever leave their rugs and never come back to reclaim them—he has a carpet-cleaning business—he stepped over to the pile of rolled-up ones along the wall, hefted up a big wool piece, unfurled it on the floor, and said, Here. You can have it. It once lay in Barry’s home. He’d been wanting to drop it off at Mercy House—a local, seedy secondhand shop for the down and out as well as regular ordinary propertied bargain hunters. Donations are always accepted. Barry didn’t know this, but the drab yellow was the exact perfect color. He said the rug we’d brought in—worn, too small for the bedroom—probably wasn’t worth the cleaning fee. He helped lug his beauty out to our car. When I took him his cookies yesterday, he said—well, I forget what he said. Maybe something about things working out for us both. He’d not had to bother with hauling the rug away. He has my everlasting devotion. But here’s what’s dicey. How can a per...
Read more
Image
People tell me they don’t have stinkbugs. Is this true? This can’t be true. Is the situation worse here? Is it because we live in the woods? They seem to travel in pairs. A little stinker will be lurking under a leaf of my Aloe vera, just its antlers and kneecaps visible. I’ll look around for the other, and, sure enough, it’s plastered against the window, deep in meditation. I’m reading, late, and out of nowhere one will dive-bomb through the lamplight, past my head. In the yawning, early sunlit hours one comes stepping across the covers toward my pillow. Like it has the right. Many lie dead around the house, except sometimes when I pick one up its legs wave weakly. My husband, who knows these things, says the bugs are non-native. In the objective, unbigoted sense of the word, they’re aliens, truly. And in my mind, wherever they came from, they’re spying. They’re collecting data. Beneath their hard little armored shells, they’re plotting. In the days ahead I will speak of...
Read more