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Fourteen years ago, after more than three decades as a resident of Hawaii, David C. Fischer, fifty-seven years old and wifeless at the time, moved to Fjord, Wisconsin, hoping to live out the rest of his life in a one-story stone house. The house was about three years younger than Fischer, who had found it advertised online and contracted to buy it sight unseen.
Sight unseen is what he claimed, but the perhaps interesting fact is, Fischer had got to thinking, a few weeks into the purchase process, that he, with his teenaged daughter, one September morning a couple of years before, had visited an auntie on the same street as the stone house and had walked up and down that street, admiring autumn foliage, and could it be possible, Fischer wondered, that the house would appear in any of the photos he recalled taking that day?
Well, yes, it could be. Possible. When Fischer hunted through his Kodachromes and his daughter’s color prints, he found glimpses of the stone house in many of the dozen or so pictures the two of them had taken. Glorious maples, peak of the season! One of his daughter’s pictures was more than a glimpse. It included a full view of the south and east sides of the home, but Fischer, until he examined that photograph, had scarcely seen the dwelling for the trees.
The house, when Fischer arrived to take possession of it, was essentially empty. It had drapes and blinds. It had green shag carpeting in the dining and living rooms and the hall. The kitchen lacked a full complement of appliances. And so, over the next few months, Fischer made many foraging excursions to yard sales throughout Galloway County and to the Sears store in the nearby city of Madison. At Sears he purchased a fancier refrigerator than he’d ever had before, a five-burner gas stove, a washing machine, a lawn mower, and a snow blower. He bought an over-the-stove microwave-and-exhaust-hood, which has been stored ever since in his basement, because the countertop microwave for which he spent three dollars at a yard sale has grown clattery with age but continues to heat anything Fischer has asked it to.
Last night, late, first day of August in the midst of what seems the longest summer of modern times, when every broadcast of the evening news begins with an enumeration of sickness and death, Fischer washed his and Celeste’s supper dishes and gently scoured and rinsed two cast iron fry pans. He set the pans upon the stove, lit a gas burner under each of them, and turned each knob to a bit below medium. Four minutes is what it takes to dry a cast iron pan and warm it enough to absorb a good rub of canola oil. Fischer pressed the timer button on the electronic panel of the stove, but, as often happens, the chirp indicating a successful press did not sound. So Fischer carefully pressed again, on the worn and cracked upper left corner of the indented thumb-sized button. This time, Chirp! The four-minute countdown began.
As the wet surfaces began to sizzle, David Fischer thought affectionately of the stove and considered how disappointed he would be if something went wrong with it. He had bought it at a nice discount, a discontinued model that had been on display, a little scuffed, but elegantly black, and it came with a full one-year warranty. The salesperson had urged Fischer to purchase an additional warranty for three years more. “There’s lots of electronics in this stove,” she said, “and if it goes out on you, it will be costly to repair.”
Fischer said, “Thank you. I think not.” On subsequent visits to the Sears store he bought each of his kitchen appliances, and his washing machine, as well, from the same salesperson, Jill Wilson. He called before each Madison trip to make sure she would be available. With every purchase, Jill quoted a price for an extended warranty, but Fischer, chose each time to take his chances. No problem. Jill never pushed beyond that one remark about costly electronics. No problem then and no problem now, really, knock on wood. In all these years Fischer has never, for any of his Sears products, had to summon a technician to make repairs.
Fourteen years is probably beyond the term of any warranty Sears might have sold, but last night, when the button required a second jab of Fischer’s thumb, he thought of Jill and wondered whether he had saved enough money by now, by forgoing various extended warranties, to cover the cost of a new stove if the present one were to quit.
It was just an idle wondering, Fischer doesn’t really care. But in those measured minutes while the pans were still drying he thought of mortality and obsolescence. One of two towering ash trees east of the house had to be taken down the first year that Fischer lived in Fjord. Both maples, a sugar and a red, in front are also now long gone. Jill Wilson is gone, reportedly. And all those people, masked or maskless, mentioned in the evening news, Fischer thought of them and muttered, “Oh, my! Oh, my!”
The buzzer blared. Fischer pressed the timer button and turned the burner knobs to Off. But the buzzer blared once more, and Fischer pressed again, more forcefully.
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