It is writing prompt day again…

I thought perhaps I might try to make an actual post this week… you know… because I really haven’t most of the summer… Just little quips… pictures… and crazy to share… But this week I thought… well just maybe… lets see how it goes…. I am choosing “Tell us about something you broke.” … because as I read through the prompts this week I saw that indeed I had a story for each of them… But this one could go so many directions… Broken bones? Many… Broken cars… Like mine in the bottom of the off ramp embankment? … I have caught a vacuum and a blender on fire in the same week… I wish I were making this shit up… OH! I know! There was this one time I blew up a Kitchen…

I was 18 … Living in an adult halfway house (getting there and where I went from there is a completely different story) being the youngest by at least 6 years in the home I was tired of being treated like I wasn’t capable of anything… We all had different reasons for being there… The house chores were divided up by the facility managers and even they tended to treat me like a kid sister (you know… as an adult now… I should have savored it… instead of being offended by it) and after 3 months of vacuuming the upstairs living area everyday I went to them and told them that I thought their vacuum was broken… It wasn’t picking up even the smallest things any longer… They asked me if I had changed the bag… and I stared vacantly at them and inquired “What bag?” … “Where do you think all the stuff goes?” … Blink Blink … “into the vacuum”… Come on people I was 18… and based on where I was you can guess that I hadn’t really had a normal upbringing…. In fact… I can’t remember having ever vacuumed before this… another thing I had never actually done is cook anything that wasn’t made in a microwave… But it wouldn’t have done much for my self-esteem to point that out as they suggested we rotate jobs and I be in charge of setting up lunch … All I had to do was set out sandwich stuff … and warm soup on the stove… there were approximately 35 residents in the home… male and female… and it wouldn’t work to have all of them attempting make lunch at once… so setting up lunch in an assembly line was the answer… I stepped into the kitchen that day… and pulled a couple of Family Size Campbell’s Tomato soup cans from the pantry… found a large pot… and looked at the stove…. I had seen my mother use one of course… I had a general idea… I turned the knob with the matching diagram indicating it was to the burner I had set the pot on to medium… and went to the fridge to get all the sandwich fixings and condiments….  I smelled something… but again… it becomes very apparent that I hadn’t grown up like other people… because I didn’t know what it was… and just ignored it…. soon… Ray popped his head in and said “Whew… Smells like gas!”… I looked at him and him at the stove…. “Kerry, you have to light it for it to heat up” …. Blink… blink… “How do I light it?”….. he turned the knob unaware how long I had actually left it like that….. and the entire room lit up blue with a big WHOOSH… We lost arm hair… and eyebrows hair looked a little crisp and curled up on the end… but that was the day I learned what a gas stove was….and that was the last day they ever asked me to do anything in Kitchen… I was given back the vacuum that now miraculously picked things up again… and never… ever… lived it down.