Kitchen Update

Missing: one frightened little girl. Name: Bettina Miller. Description: six years of age, average height and build, light brown hair, quite pretty. Last seen being tucked into bed by her mother a few hours ago. Last heard--aye, there's the rub, as Hamlet put it. For Bettina Miller can be heard quite clearly, despite the rather curious fact that she can't be seen at all. Present location? Let's say for the moment--in the Twilight Zone.
-Rod Serling, Little Girl Lost


Got back last Sunday from a nice 10 day trip that included stays in Denver, Walden, and Fort Collins, CO. It is always good to go back home to Colorado. While we were gone our contractor retextured and painted the kitchen walls. When I walked back into the house and saw what he had done I was very pleased. You could not tell that a cabinet had once hung from the wall above where the refrigerator sits. Something else was different but I did realize what it was until after my husband had talked to our contractor.

When we first moved into our house we had to replace the kitchen stove and I was somewhere else on the day this happened. Fast forward to last week when we moved the stove out of the kitchen so the walls could be painted. Imagine my surprise when I saw a 12 inch backward L-shaped hole in the wall that had been hidden by the stove. It seems the hole had been there since we moved in and my husband had decided it wasn't worth fixing since once the stove was in place no one would see it. When I discovered the hole I wanted it fix because it creeped me out.

As a child I had seen that Twilight Zone episode where the little girl fell out of bed and rolled through the wall into another dimension. From that moment on the sight of a house wall with a hole in it made me uncomfortable. My husband still insisted it didn't need to be fixed because it was covered by the stove. Since no one would know it was there why waste the money fixing it? I knew he was worried about the cost of the kitchen upgrade (it was costing more than he expected) so I let it go and promised myself I would try not to think about the hole in the wall when I used the stove or after I went to bed at night.

I had done such a good job of not thinking about the hole in the wall that I had not even noticed it had been fixed when we got back home. We had not asked the contractor to fix the hole but we has not asked him to not fix the hole either. Since he isn't the type of guy who would leave a hole in a wall he was painting he repaired it first. And he did such a good job the wall looked as if there had never been a hole there in the first place. I must admit I slept better on Sunday night than I did the nights after I discovered the hole. Funny how the mind works.