Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

How wonderful kitchens are, when we’re very small.

And sometimes, how terrible! I must have been three or four on that long-ago day when my mother got a big silver spoon caught in her cake-mixing beaters. We children had been watching her, hypnotized by the good kitchen smells and the hum of the mixer, patiently waiting for leftover batter to lick.

Suddenly–Whack! The spoon was pulled out of my mother’s hand and bent double by the beaters. The motor stopped droning and began to smoke. We looked at our mother. She looked at the beaters, tears came to her eyes, she was trying not to cry…. She didn’t like making mistakes–and she was still (from my point of view now) very, very young.

Of course, my sister and I began to cry at once, setting each other off to louder and louder wails. Then my mother started instead to laugh, so we both laughed too, and all three of us thought the whole thing was a wonderful joke.

This isn’t what I had planned to write about, but blogs can be like that….

Well, here’s my mom enjoying a happier moment, a few years before my earliest memory.