Thursday March 3, 2022

 Good Day Bad Night Long Story

   It was a pretty decent sunny day in Palmville with a high of about 18-degrees above zero for a change, and no noticeable wind. I was returning home from Wannaska, when I saw one of my cousins was outside taking advantage of the perfect day too; he was splitting cobs of firewood with his logsplitter, then placing them into the bucket of his loader tractor standing nearby. Deciding to stop and visit with him a few minutes, I parked behind his Ranger ATV parked there, so as not to block the road should he be using it on his trips back to his house. Busy as he was in his work, I waited until he was away from the log splitter, then yelled a greeting, surprising him; we shared a good laugh.

   Arriving home a short mile or so later, I decided I could rebuild a long-neglected clothes drawer outdoors on the picnic table, because the day was so warm, relatively speaking. Earlier that morning, my sister in Iowa, and a friend in Jamestown, had both boasted temperatures where they lived were into the mid to high sixties and all their snow was gone; and here, I was happy enough that temperatures were above zero.

   Rebuilding the drawer meant making a new bottom for it, a task that required some elbow room that the top of the big wooden picnic table provides and my basement work area did not. Situated where I can park my car, I can listen to the car radio as I work out here in the middle of nowhere; Ojibwe flute music seemed appropriate that day in particular.

No elbow room

   The project was a head scratcher. A whole edge of the drawer had splintered off some years ago before my time and the bottom had fallen out, making the drawer useless. I had not fixed it ‘forever’, so the loosed 3-corner situation required making a whole new bottom piece and the addition of some quarter-round inside the drawer to tie it in, and some new guides on the reverse side so it would slide straight, in and out.

   I had to rasp the newly cut edges I had made to ensure a good fit and used a ratchet strap to hold it all together temporarily until the next time I could ‘go to town’ (Roseau) for wood glue, short screws, and some other items we needed. When the nearest grocery and big box stores are 20 miles away, you have to make every trip count and get everything you need each time. The drawer could wait another couple days.    

   I worked on it until just before dark when the sun was all but obscured by silhouettes of trees and brush, and the high banks and drifts of snow had taken on a bluish cast. I was tired and hungry. Still, I wanted to stay outdoors until dark; it was just so nice outside. I thought a beer would go well with the evening, and so opened the basement door to get one, when I could smell that the wife had cooked spaghetti, and totally eliminated my resolve; I hurriedly undressed from all my winter gear.

   She was on the couch in the living room, watching TV by the time I got to the kitchen. “There are garlic bread sticks in the deep freeze, should you want some,” she said. She had gone to all the trouble of making me supper; food that she can’t eat herself, that cooking my own side-dishes or in this case, garlic bread sticks, is no big deal ... or so I thought.

  I noticed the heating instructions only included conventional and toaster-ovens; no microwave instructions, so seeing the conventional call-out was for 7-9 minutes; and the toaster oven for 8-10 minutes I figured I could set the microwave at 4-minutes. Then promptly forgot all about them until the kitchen smoke alarm went bonkers and we ran willy-nilly into the kitchen with the microwave billowing smoke.

   The wife jerked open the door open on the microwave and got a face full of acrid smoke that she sorrily regretted, then angrily whirled around out of the kitchen, down the three steps, and out the door into the frigid night, yelling at me to get all the windows and doors open, and get fans to exhaust the smoke.

   The wife was not at all happy about what had transpired. Coughing, almost retching, she returned to the house to grab a coat from the hallway, then hurried back outside yelling to me to get her a Covid mask so she could breathe through it. She said the smell was just terrible. I thought it smelled like burnt popcorn, but not at all as bad as car tires or burnt chicken feathers.

   “Could’ve been worse,” I thought to myself but did not say to her, as many years ago some wise long-married friend once told me there was a fine art to editing what it was one should say to a wife in the immediate, and what one should maybe omit until things settle down a bit.

   Sure, I greatly regretted my oversight, but there was no recourse; what was done was done, and we had to work together to exhaust as much smoke as we could as fast as we could; which, as the wife pointedly pointed out, meant turning off the furnace so not to circulate the smoke throughout the house; and reiterated to me to open all the windows and doors we could, putting a fan at each.

   I shook the burned bread sticks into the snow and washed the carousel plate they were burned on, in the sink. I should’ve thought to immediately unplug the smelly appliance and carry it outdoors, but that wasn’t done until we got all the fans set up; I just wasn’t on-the-ball ...

Culprits: burned garlic bread sticks.

    Temperatures dropped precipitously in the house and basement in just a short while; so we doubled up on warm clothing; in addition, the wife wrapped herself in a blanket and laid down on the couch. The TV was back on to help break the stress. After about an hour or so, we both calmed down from the experience; I closed the big basement door and turned the furnace back on.

   Overnight, all windows remained somewhat open; all the doors were shut against an influx of warmth and food-seeking rodents; fans continued to run creating an unusual industrial ‘air’ about the house. Pockets of smoke smell laid  in corners close to the floor. We maintain air flow even as I write this.

  The following day, Jackie pulled out some large seldom-used bowls from the lower kitchen cupboard. I was afraid we were going to have to wash all of those, and all the dishes in the other cupboards, and the walls as she had earlier mentioned, so I asked her, and looking at me strangely she answered, “No, I’m just putting away the spaghetti noodle strainer.” Whew!

   She didn’t know, it was an event that I had buried in my subconscious until just that moment, when I experienced a flashback of the trembling fury my Mother had exhibited upon the reveal of my pubescent idiocy, and thus re-ignited a well-deserved ancient fear I apparently have of enraged older women.

Because when I was, maybe 13 or 14-years old, and home alone on some rare occasion (and probably never again), I ‘experimented’ melting plastic in one of Mom’s pots on the kitchen stove ... and then watched in mystified horror as black soot writhed upwards toward the kitchen ceiling ... and into the living room and ... on all the curtains ... and the furniture. I immediately knew (and she reiterated) I was a bad son; a very very bad son and her daughters would have never done anything as stupid as that. It was amazing that Mom didn’t have a stroke on the spot, given her bad heart; and the fact that I’ve grown to such an old age as I am now. I never saw her so mad all the rest of her life.

Jackie was of course, angry about what happened, but she got a new microwave out of the deal.

“Oops!” Shouldn’t have I said that?