The Queen of Boiling Water

I have one purpose in life, and that is to boil water. True. I spend all day long boiling water. And then I filter it.

I boil water for washing dishes, rinsing produce, cooking food, making hot chocolate, making juice, and just plain drinking. Actually, I have a complex system. OK—maybe complex is going a bit far, and it’s not really a system so much as a daily routine in drudgery. But hey—it keeps me busy.

My day is complete when I maintain two filtered water pitchers in the fridge, two plastic “standby” pitchers of unfiltered water on the counter, and a big pot of boiling water. Yup. That’s the pinnacle of life.

So basically my day goes something like this: boil water, make breakfast, boil water, do the dishes, boil water, fill the pitchers, boil water, start on lunch, boil water….. You get the picture. I’m the queen of boiling water.

But this past Christmas, the familiar routine took a temporary twist—and I wasn’t even here to see it. I’d had to return home because of a family emergency—so I spent Christmas with my mom.

During one of my more-than-daily phone calls home, I asked my son what he had planned for the day. He replied, “Probably setting up the tree again.” “Again?”

Turns out that when my husband was decorating the school for the holidays, he ran across a perfectly good artificial Christmas tree. The only thing it was missing was the base. Well, base or no base, that is quite a find, considering that we live in the tundra where the closest thing to a Christmas tree is a short, scraggly bush-looking thing. So, following his “waste not, want not” philosophy of life, he hauled the thing home to grace our living room. Getting it there was no problem. Getting it to stay up on its precarious pole was another matter all together. But he is an ingenious soul who can fix most anything. And when it can’t be fixed, there’s always duct tape. Yup. They taped the tree to the couch and the wall. Only problem was that if they made any sudden movements, sneezed, or breathed hard, the thing came tumbling down. And since the house held nothing but active males, there was a bunch of chasing and wrestling going on. So the tree spent a lot of time horizontal, and they went through a ton of tape.

Their holiday routine became: boil water, set up the tree, boil water, set up the tree, boil water, set up the tree…

Isn’t change wonderful!