I could list the incredibly long litany of things I have for which to be grateful. Family, friends, health, wealth, satisfying and gratifying occupations... the list points to an embarrassment of riches. And while worthy, and admirable, and even desirable, my list is not very original or unusual or particularly interesting to anyone but myself. So instead, we'll just consider the above as a given, and move on to more potentially interesting and probably more embarrassing events to illustrate my participation in the season.
Let me preface this by saying that the older we get, the more we tend to do things on auto pilot. Let's face it, by the time you're ::ahem:: forty-something... you've brushed your teeth HOW many times? so you may find yourself drifting off into Other Thoughts That Might Be Slightly More Interesting a time or two. Same goes for vacuuming, starting coffee, routine cooking chores, unloading the dishwasher. This is my justification, or explanation, or at the very least an attempt to justify the fact that I lost the lid to my 2.5 quart saucepan.
Yeah, that's right, you heard me. I lost the glass lid to a cooking pot. An item that never leaves the kitchen, that is used on a near-daily basis, that even a 3 year old can keep track of, and all of the sudden one day mine is POOF! completely obliterated from existence.
It actually took me an indeterminate period of time before I even really noticed that the lid was gone - more like a gradually dawning awareness that it wasn't in the sink, or in the dishwasher. Finally, though, all dishes were clean and the dishwasher was empty, and there
was no lid.
I have to confess that this is the point where I became suspicious of my husband :) He suffers from what I consider an almost manic tidiness, which often requires him to put things away even if he has no idea where they belong. Because I do NOT suffer from tidiness of the manic sort (or any other, really), I tend to view the trait with a barely-restrained disapproval tucked under a veneer of impatience (kindly note how there are NO redeeming virtues in that list of my own attributes - I want credit for full disclosure, seeing as how I will likely deserve no credit for anything else). So this bad attitude of mine drove me to look in the most unlikely corners of kitchen cabinets - even behind and under stuff (funny how motivated we can be when it means catching a
loved one in a perceived wrong-doing. However, for all the effort I put into my search, there was no sign of the pot lid.
Gradually, hope of pinning the problem on my husband began to fade, ironically at about the same rate as a growing conviction that I had done something stupid began to flourish. I turned over some scenarios in my mind which would explain this ridiculous little mystery, which was both so unimportant and yet so unlikely as to be oddly consuming. After mulling the possibility of the dog hiding it in his bed (having mistaken it for a curiously shaped bone), checking the back of the dishwasher to see if it got jostled out of the rack, pondering on the possibility of aliens with a warped but impish sense of humor spiriting it away for their cosmic kitchen.... perhaps the most feasible suggestion was that the lid had been mistakenly set on a disposable cardboard item, such as a box or a pizza tray, and simply swooped into the garbage unseen. I confess to a preference for this one, because as the not-so-tidy inhabitant of a two-person household, the onus of the guilty behavior (intended or not) probably wasn't on me. And having reached this conclusion, I gave up the search, resigned to having the next largest lid serve double duty in the future. Tacky, sloppy, but no more than I deserved for my carelessness.
Last night, I trudged into the kitchen to make pies for today. I was feeling kind of sorry for myself, muttering under my breath about the unfairness of a holiday that sends one member of a family into the kitchen for the better part of its duration; cooking, doing dishes, cooking some more, and in general making nearly every kitchen mess known to mankind which then had to be set to rights, entailing even MORE time in the scullery (yeah, I was waxing melodramatic by this point). As I clattered bowls and measuring cups and measuring spoons with a little extra fervor, I grabbed the lid from the flour canister and stuck my hand in to grab the measuring cup I keep there on a permanent basis, I heard (and felt) the distinctive clink of fingernails tapping.... glass.
Grabbing the canister and peering inside, sure enough, there was my pot lid. I cannot even
conceive of the mental process I must have undergone to put it there. And sadly there is no way I can blame this on my beloved husband, because he does not cook or bake, and therefore he does not use flour. So that leaves me with me, because the dog is
no way TALL enough to get to the counter, even if he were SMART enough to plot a Lid-hiding Confidence-busting coup.
So yeah. I'm grateful for family, and friends, and plenty, and blessings of every sort. And I'm especially grateful to know that I may be nuts enough to accidentally stash a pot lid in the flour canister, but not crazy enough to actually throw one out (or worse). And I may just be coming around and faintly reconciled to baking pies. I'll get back to you on that after another slice with extra whipped cream, and a quick
inventory of the baking utensils...
.) 
