Thursday, November 17, 2011

November 17th

I've been looking over the blogs in my bookmarks, and it struck me how many of them have not been updated in a long long time. Like 6 months or over a year, even. Do you think I should just delete them, and work on finding good bookmarks in their place? Some of them, like Magazine Man (link over there>>>>>) have been a constant inspiration since I first began this blog. It is a shame they don't give some closure (new job, too busy, etc.) to their blogs. If I ever give this one up I'll say so, and not have it just sputter off into oblivion.

One of the NaBloPoMo prompts earlier this week was about recounting a traumatic event. One this week involves facing a fear. This story is about both. When I was a teenager my sister and I were alone at home and we were baking cookies. When they were in the gas oven, we began cleaning up the kitchen. I went out the back door with a bag of trash; just inside the glass door, on the right, was the stove. I was looking at the edge of the stove when it went BOOM and flames shot out around the oven door and blew the door off the stove. I heard my sister scream, but I couldn't bear to go in by the back door, and so I raced around to the front door to find her there, screaming. Neighbors came from all over to the house, and one brave man raced in, pulled the stove away from the wall and shut the gas off at the back of the stove. When everything calmed down, we went inside to call Mom at work. Her first question was, was the kitchen clean when everyone went in? Which maybe wasn't the response I expected. Anyway, the rest of that day neither of us would walk past the kitchen to go to the bedrooms or the bathroom, for fear of being trapped in the back of the house. Over the next several weeks the fear only got worse. I slept in the living room on the couch. And in the end, Mom and Dad bought an electric stove and replaced the old gas one. What had happened, was that the old stove did not light the oven automatically, you had to strike a match and hold it to the hole in the bottom on the oven. We did that, but apparently the flame blew out, the oven filled with gas which ignited when the gas reached the pilot lights on the stove burners. Stoves aren't made like that anymore, you can see why. But the recollection of that fear, the gut twisting breathless bracing I had to do to walk into the kitchen before the stove was replaced, stuck with me for many months. When people complain about how shoddy modern-day things are made, I think of the gas stove, and I know that some old things change for the better.



Thought for the day: "Support a cause. Stop plate tectonics."

3 comments :

SkippyMom said...

Oh gosh Redhead - that IS scary. I am so glad your sister and you were okay.

We actually had a stove like that for years and the one time [on Christmas Day no less] it did something similar my Mother refused to cook anymore until my Dad replaced it. Glad he did.

Hope you have a nice weekend. :)

Dina Roberts said...

Scary!

I'm glad you and your sister survived that.

Your mother's reaction....I don't know what to think. Was she obsessed with appearances?

Or maybe she was trying to make light of the situation?

I hope she eventually showed concern and gratitude for your safety.

Redhead said...

My Mom's reaction was typical of her. Appearances were very important to her. Once the pastor came by on a Saturday while we were doing the dreaded lawn grooming. After he left Mom sighed and said, "at least the yard and the house were clean." We, of course, were dripping wet and filthy. But that was OK.
I guess after the stove explosion, she figured if we were well enough to call her, we were OK.