And yet I Missed Her

And yet I Missed Her

Mrs. C was away for a week working at a Ballroom Dance competition.  I was very careful to not change anything while she was away.  Mrs. C does not do well with change. 

In her absence I was good about keeping things as clean and as neat as a house of a semi-hoarder can be kept.  The bathrooms were all cleaned and floors steamed.  Dishes were all washed.  I changed three things…they were executive decisions.

First, I hung up two winter coats that have been laying on a chair for five months.  The chair is one that I like to sit and watch TV when I am in the kitchen area.  It is a chair she gave me one Christmas for just that purpose, until it became a coat rack.  I figured this was a safe decision, she could always take the coats out of the closet and throw them back on the chair.

The second decision involved a change jar we keep at the entrance of the house.  Years ago, I bought a change jar that could read each coin that drops through the coin slot and keep a running tabulation of how much change was in the jar.  I bought this to replace a Stewarts root beer bottle that had a quarter sized slot carved into the cap.  I finally replaced the root beer jar with the upgrade but I was smart enough to not throw the old bottle away.

My final decision involved a kitchen rack for holding sponges, a potato brush and other stuff.  This rack had suction cups for holding it on the wall, but it was simply resting on the kitchen counter.  I stuck it to the wall.

When Mrs. C came home she barely made it through the front door and blurted out with rising panic in her voice,

“What is this?  Where is the change bottle? Did you throw it away?”

“I know better than that, this bottle is an upgrade, the old bottle is safe, though God only knows why you want it.”

“I liked that bottle!”

She next went into the Kitchen TV area to throw her coat on my chair.

“Where are my coats!”

“Oh, for crap sake, I put them in the closet, go get them and throw them on the chair before you go totally wack-a-doodle.”

The piece de resistance was the sponge holder.

“You stuck the sponge holder to the wall?”

“Yes, that’s what those suction things are for.  If you didn’t want it stuck on the wall why did you buy something with those suction cups?”

“I thought it would stick to the Corian backing, but it is too high.  You stuck it to the paint, and it will pull paint off the wall.”

“It will be fine.”

“It’s going to ruin the paint!”

“For crap sake, it’s not going to pull off any paint, and if it does, I’ll stick it back up where the paint was and no one will ever see!”

“I’ll know.”

“Get over it!”

“Jerk!”

“Welcome home…I missed you.”

“I missed you too…but you’re still a jerk.”