#38 He is Slow to Anger

This weekend I experienced my greatest gaffe as a wife so far. There are two tales I must tell before allowing you to hear of this misfortune.

The first tale:

When expecting visitors, I have this strange tick about me...I like my house to be neat.

I also have another strange tick, I don't mind if the house looks neat but secretly is bursting behind closed doors with dirty laundry and dirty dishes.

Therefore, clothing that was meant to be on hangers, yet somehow never found its way there, is thrown into baskets and shoved into the hall closet. Dirty dishes who never cleaned themselves are piled and stored in the stove.

(Believe me folks, it has been much worse than this)

The second tale:

Every other Saturday my husband cooks dinner.

Every other Saturday my husband cooks salmon for dinner.

There is a reasoning behind this.

I don't want to cook salmon, but I want to eat salmon.

So, every other Saturday my husband cooks salmon and we like this arrangement just fine.

Now, the misfortune:

This Saturday we were expecting late morning visitors. Therefore, my cleanliness tick came into action and the house appeared spotless.

This Saturday was also salmon night. My husband went about making the feast as I sat two rooms away, enjoying my couch and a movie.

I knew everything was alright when I heard him begin doing the dishes. He had to of retrieved the dishes I had thrown into the stove earlier, so there was no need to mention the obvious: that I had put a lot of dishes into hiding in the stove.

Thirty minutes later, as the salmon was pulled out of the broiler I heard my first name spoken with an air of complete disbelief in the firmest and loudest way ever uttered by my beloved.

Before it had completely left his lips I knew what disaster had befallen in the kitchen.

My initial thought was to allow amnesia to overcome me. However, I am a horrid actress, therefore I thought about running for the door and never looking back.

This is perhaps because I knew the worst of it without even stepping into the kitchen to take actual witness to it myself. You see, the skillets, the pans and even the Corelle dishes would be able to withstand the broiling temperature, therefore I knew the disbelief in his voice did not come from that section of the stove. However, the four or five plastic plates I had thrown on the bottom of the dirty dish pile led me to mentally picture the horror scene that my husband was staring upon and to wish deeply that closing my eyes would make it all disappear.

Some overwhelming form of courage rose within me, prompting me off my couch, into a sane state of mind, away from escaping to the front door, and into the kitchen. The stove was open, and a small puff of white smoke began to spread out into the air filling the house with the smell of burnt plastic.

He didn't say a word, which scared me a little so I instantly went for a pot holder, pulled the pile of plastic dishes from the stove, and tossed them into the trash. The bottom plate was the only one that had melted from its plate form and there was a tidy pool of yellow plastic at the bottom of the stove, and drippy drops falling off the rack where the dish had sat.

He got a spatula, cleaned all the melted plastic out of the stove and that was that.

(The leftovers)

Thank God he is everything that I am not. Had the situation been reversed, his name would certainly not have been the only word to leave my mouth upon viewing the monstrosity that lay waiting in the stove.

And, we both might not have made it out of that kitchen alive.