Lessons learned

One Saturday, not long ago, I was doing my usual Saturday stuff when I got a phone call from my husband. He said there had been a grease fire in the kitchen, but fortunately it had been put out with the fire extinguisher. No big deal, I thought. So I lost a frying pan. It needed replacing anyway. Then he said he was going to call our insurance agent. Insurance agent? I wondered. How much damage had been done anyway?

I soon found out. The kitchen was smothered with white powder from the fire extinguisher. The range hood was pretty much destroyed. In fact, a piece of it had melted and fallen onto the range. It then solidified and became a permanent fixture on the coil burner. I wanted to just sweep up all the powder, but we had to wait until an insurance adjuster (or an assessor or somebody) looked at all the damage. Besides, the powder was an irritant and shouldn't just be swept up. So our kitchen was not usable. We went out to dinner for several nights in a row.

One might think that eating out all the time like that would have resembled being on vacation. If one were to think that, however, one would be wrong. Vacations are when you spend your days at an amusement park or beach and you get to go out to eat. We were not spending our days doing fun things and we had to go out to eat. By the fifth night, I really didn't care where we had dinner. I just wanted food to somehow come our way. One night, we went to my mother-in-law's house, and it was a very nice change for the better.

Eventually, we were able to get a new stove. A very nice new stove. A stove with a convection setup and one of those burners that is just for keeping food warm. It has three racks. (The old stove had only one.) It also has this really cool feature where you turn a knob and the correct burner turns on. (Something the old stove didn't have.) Anyway, our kitchen is now quite usable and I am happy to be cooking again.

So what are the lessons here? I am not saying that you should set fire to your kitchen in order to get a new stove. The phone calls and paperwork were a big headache and I am quite opposed to kitchen fires. Or any indoor fire for that matter.

One important lesson is to always have a fire extinguisher in your house. It is like having a form of insurance. You hope you'll never use it, but there might just come a day when you will be very glad to have it.

The other lesson is this: Sometimes you might have a problem so big that you can't even begin to figure out how to solve it. But after a time, it might turn out just right and somehow you may even find a happy ending.