Exhibit A

Neither of us remembered putting a broken glass into the cabinet, which gave rise to questions like,

How did it break?
When did it break?

I recalled, early in our marriage, pulling half a plate out of a kitchen cabinet. After blinking at it a moment I’d reached in again and found the other half. The plate had somehow split in two after being put away. Maybe that’s what happened to the glass.

Was the broken-off part in the cabinet?
>searches< Nope.

Maybe it broke in the dishwasher.
>opens dishwasher door, scans top rack< Didn’t see it.

Ummmmmm. . . somewhere in our home, a sharp and jagged chunk of curved glass is hiding. . . just waiting for a bare foot or an inquisitive doggie nose to wander by.

Whenever we were in the kitchen, we’d peek under the fronts of the lower cabinets with deep suspicion. I’d get out the stepladder to look in the juice-glass shelf one more time. We checked the pantry. Looked in the cabinet “one more time” again. Pulled out the lower rack and examined the dishwasher floor. Asked each other, “Where could that stupid piece of glass be???”

We were just waiting for one of us to step on the missing shard. I wore shoes at all times.

Gradually, though, the sense of danger faded. Perhaps the shard had walked away, or fallen into the trash of its own accord.

We both tend to use the same drinking glass over and over, so the top dishwasher rack doesn’t fill up very fast. It was days later that I pulled out the rack to load some glasses and coffee cups that had collected. There, in the rear corner, curved over the rack and nearly invisible unless you were looking straight down at it, lay the missing piece.

What a relief!

But I still wear shoes in the house. . .

Your turn: Have you dealt with mysterious household gremlins like we have? I’d love to hear about it in the “Leave a Reply” box below.

Thanks for reading,
Jan