Background story: A couple of weeks back, Jillian had a hankering for waffles. Blueberry waffles. I searched and search for our waffle maker, but could not find it. I had a very vague memory of giving it to one of the kids. So, I ran out to Meijer and purchased a vertical waffle iron- didn’t work well at all with the blueberry waffles, but, to be fair and in hindsight: I wouldn’t have expected it to with the lumps of blueberries in the batter. So, I tried it with one of their recipes. The batter leaked past the edges, and the process was generally messy due to their lack of thought with regard to the design of the measure used to fill it. This waffle maker is a great concept, but it’s definitely not ready for prime time. I took it back and got one like our old one.
This afternoon, I went on a rampage, looking for things to put at the curb – some clutter reduction. And, in plain sight in the laundry room, on a shelf I had to walk past to get to the area I searched on that fateful Saturday, was the old waffle maker – sitting on a pristine manilla envelope with a little 1960s-looking dude with a Bing Crosby hairdo saying “Take your pictures home” and “Lets trade pictures!”
Inside this envelope are class pictures of Kim from Kindergarten to second or third grade and a first communion picture. Who knows how long they’ve been there, and who can fathom why they were there rather than in one of the photo repositories in the house? It was almost as if I was tossed as a reminder from Kim: “Hey! I was here!” Why it would have been necessary for me to receive such a reminder at this juncture, I don’t know. She is ever-present on my mind.