Alex and I use and abuse and repair our appliances until the repair people run screaming from our home and tell us to lose their number. Our old stove was here in 2019 when we moved in. We’d been coaxing her along for a few years now, replacing igniters and heating elements. The repair guy who came to our house for the dishwasher quoted me $400 to replace a broken oven knob so instead, I used my label maker and placed a “DO NOT USE” label on the offending dial. Last month, I tried to cook a casserole. Although the bake time on the recipe was forty-five minutes, at two hours, the center still wasn’t done. Alex and I looked at each other and said, in unison, “We need a new oven.”
So, we spent a weekend pricing and looking at our options, landing on the basic model of a reliable brand, that annoyingly comes with wifi. The salesman was unable to answer me when I asked why exactly a stove would need wifi. Some beefy men came and installed the new stove, hauling the sad old one away.
“Guess how long the preheat took in the new oven,” Alex said after using it for the first time. “Five minutes.”
I blinked at him, not understanding.
At the end of her life, our old stove, Ole Faithful, had taken forty-five minutes, FORTY-FIVE MINUTES, to preheat and even then, she wouldn’t hold her temperature. We had to plan our whole fucking day around preheating the stove. “Oh, honey. There’s a pizza in the freezer for dinner. Don’t forget to turn the oven on at 2pm so we can eat at 6.” We just stopped trying to make baked potatoes altogether.
So, a five-minute pre-heat time stunned me. What are we, the Jetsons? I thought as I ran my hand over the stainless steel.
It is funny to me that we didn’t really know how bad it was until we had something else to compare it to. If the old stove hadn’t given up the ghost, we never would have known how good things could be; we would have just continued on into perpetuity, taking eight hours to bake bread and avoiding large dinner parties, for fear of serving frozen lasagna.
The brokenness made way for something new.
***
The Texas heat has nearly killed me this year and I haven’t been outside in months. I just can’t handle it. The heat makes me *angry* and going on walks is supposed to be calming, not make your head explode while you turn into a puddle on the sidewalk. Two weeks ago, Alex coaxed me out of the house and we walked to our local grocery store, despite it still being close to 100F. On our way back through a park, carrying our load of groceries, the press of the humid air felt suffocating, without even a whiff of a breeze to relieve us.
I tried, really tried, to enjoy the crisp contrast of the tippy tops of the knobby post oaks and the blue Texas sky, tried to feel some sense of awe or relief at finally being outside in nature, but to no avail.
“Yeah, I’m not enjoying this,” I complained, shifting the bag of groceries to my other hand while sweat ran down my back.
Until a miracle happened.
A sprinkler head in the park had broken and it was shooting water into the air, a little geyser of relief from the oppressive heat. A little girl, still wearing her bike helmet, her tricycle laying on its side, was running through the spray screaming with delight while her dad waited in the shade.
“Oh, we need to tell the city,” Alex said, getting out his phone to report it.
I closed my eyes and walked through the water, the droplets making polka dots on my shirt. Sure, someone needed to fix it eventually, but, in that moment, the broken sprinkler head was exactly what I needed.
A relief.
***
At the tail end of the 2002 Experiment, I wrote about going to a support group, thinking that I didn’t need it and then realizing that actually, I did. Kind of a terrifying moment to discover that my attempt at having a white-knuckled grasp on the people and situations around me meant that things weren’t working, when I had been positive that I had it all, well, under control.
At the behest of my counselor, I’ve taken the last month to just sit and be lost, broken. I’m not my usual steamroller self with a five-point agenda and deadline. I’m drifting (or trying to, as much as I can).
I think it’s been good for me to be broken, purposefully broken, to stare the brokenness in the face and acknowledge it. The cracks are letting the light in and I’m seeing some old things in a new way.
Brokenness is not always a bad thing.
Who knew?
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