“I’ve never seen so many broken dishes in my life,” my husband said. None thrown at him or at the wall in a fit of angry. No, klutzy me misses the counter top when setting a plate down, whacks a glass when talking with my hands or holds a dish awkwardly while serving food.
It happened again last week. As I prepared a plate for my husband, the bowl tipped, slid out of my hand and crashed to the floor. Thousands of pieces of glass shards exploded across the kitchen, the hall, the dining room and my bare feet.
“I’ll get it. I’ll clean it up,” my husband, the super sweeper, called. He always sweeps up any broken crockery.
I turned, looked at the floor, shook a shard off my foot and tried to carefully move away from the mess. Not careful enough. I put my heel down on an unseen chunk of glass.
It hurt. It drew blood. I pulled it out and managed to leave the arena of broken glass with no further incidents. I hobbled on tiptoes to keep blood off the carpet. I made it into the bathroom for a Band-aid and only left a couple red spots on the carpet and tile.
Meanwhile, my noble knight made three clean sweeps of the hall, the dining room and under the counter and table. “And I found pieces under the table,” he said in disbelief at the path the unbreakable glass took when it exploded.
“It looked like a good supper,” the starving man said wistfully.
“It was.” I said pulling leftovers out of the refrigerator for an emergency meal. Happily, he doesn’t have as many broken dish emergencies in recent years.
Thirty years ago, before he made that comment, I had my all time worst day of breakage. On that day, for some reason, I set my second-hand 1940’s style mixer, stand and bowl on a small kitchen stool to finish a batch of chocolate chip cookies. I was almost done when someone urgently needed me.
I tipped the mixer head down, turned to leave, and the top heavy mixer and its bowl of dough flipped onto the floor. The mixer broke, the bowl broke, the cookie dough kissed the floor.
I forget the urgent need. I do remember going back over to the counter (where I should have been in the first place) and again measuring out flour, sugar and butter for a hand mixed batch of cookies. (My Cookie Monster appetite for cookies did not wane just because one batch ended up in the trash with pieces of the mixer and its bowl.)
That batch made it into and out of the oven. I ate more than my share, arranged the rest on a platter for later and shoved it into the cupboard before we left for town.
We returned and I rushed around to prepare dinner. I opened the door that hid the cookies. The platter flew out of the cupboard, sailed to the floor and landed with another crockery shattering crash. The official glass sweeper appeared to do his duty and my favorite cookies went into the trash on top of the broken mixer, bowl and dough. We did not want to eat any tiny pieces of glass dusting the baked cookies.
That was my worst, and most expensive day in the kitchen. Expensive because I bought a new standing mixer and bowl. That mixer spent years making cookies. It never broke. It died from exhaustion from spinning dough and hiding when the crockery went flying.