The Last, Late Canning

 


You know how it's fairly easy to become accustomed to not having something, so if a time comes when you once again have it, it feels like the luxury it truly is?  Our glamorous, flat-top stove only had one working big burner for over a year, but at the end of the summer, the remaining large burner gave up the ghost with a "pop!" and sizzle-- its spirit rising to heaven in a puff of curling smoke-- and I knew those boxes of apples in the basement were going to rot. 

Canning was a fool's task using the small burners.  I tried, and it took a couple of hours just to heat the water bath canner to boiling.  (Sloth justified!) We couldn't fix the large burners because the cheapest price that we found was $250 per filament, due to the fact that the parts were now rare.  Even repairing it ourselves would still cost nearly $500 (!) for a 15+ year old stove that we received free.  So, nope.  Not gonna do it.

We figured we'd keep using the stove until we found a cheap, used replacement somewhere, and it served us well for several more months.  It would have served us well until a future pop-n-sizzle, too, but the generosity of my cousin and his wife made that unnecessary when they arrived in our driveway a few days before Thanksgiving with "something they were wondering if we'd want."  A stove of theirs had been collecting dust in the workshop for the last couple of years, and they ferried it out of their van and into our kitchen before I could even think "Jack Robinson."

The funny thing is that five minutes before they pulled into our driveway, I'd tried to buy two used stoves from Craigslist, only to find that someone had already bought the one and that the other didn't match its internet description.  God let me feel slight disappointment for only a few minutes before delivering a stove for us.






These coincidences are no such thing. They are clarion calls of the Father's beneficence, a ringing affirmation that He is present in all things, and that His fingerprints mark the small no less than the large.  What better way to enter into Thanksgiving week than with that knowledge?

So I didn't get to let all the apples rot, after all.  At least Zekie Boy volunteered to test the contents of every last bowl for me.  Little angel.