i fixed a toaster.

"beautiful job. really clean."

In her chapter on kitchen essentials in Home Cooking, Laurie Colwin rightly reminds us that “most things are frills—few are essential.” Colwin herself did not own a toaster, having decided after the death of her third that she would toast her bread under the broiler instead. I tend to agree that a toaster is not a wholly necessary household appliance, though I’ve come to appreciate the argument, voiced at least once a week in my household for the last two months, that it’s perhaps a waste of resources to heat a full-size oven, sometimes thrice in a single morning, for my children’s fickle and ill-timed calls for toast.

Still, it wasn’t a sense of necessity, or even a hankering for toast, that compelled me to finally repair this toaster. I was motivated mostly by the simple understanding that such a thing could be done. In an era of planned obsolescence, being able to make a repairs to the things we own isn’t always a given. I could hardly squander the opportunity.