Ripping off Wm Carlos Wms

The Red Teakettle

so much depends

upon

a red tea

kettle

wreathed in warm

steam

on top of the white 

stove.

This morning I blew up my teakettle.  By that I mean I boiled water in it for coffee then left it heating with the annoying whistling lid open to add a bit of moisture to a house dry from winter heat.  I do this every morning while the coffee steeps in the French press.  On this morning though, I forgot about both the coffee brewing and the kettle boiling on the stove.  YIKES!  Strong coffee and a tea kettle hopelessly dry.  Enamel fused onto the burner coil.  Spout melted beyond use.  

Thinking about it as I cleaned it up, I had never really liked this kettle.  I got it three and a half years ago when I moved in to my new apartment where everything was renters white.  The kettle I got was white and I still don't understand why the white on white on white felt like it would work for me.  It whistled which I liked, but the note of that whistle was like stepping in a pile of poo every morning.  The rest of the kitchen is tricked out in red metallic or red chromey pieces that break up the tundra of white.  Red trash bin.  Red chrome toaster.  Red metallic flake microwave.  So the tea kettle was always the red herring....or white herring in this case....of the group.  

I quickly realized that no teakettle meant no coffee tomorrow morning.  DEFCON 5.  

So off I went.  I gave the white one a hasty burial in the bin on my way out.  Then off to Home Goods.  I will now admit that I have a kitchen gadget fetish which is just weird as I am prone to tell people that the kitchen is wasted space where a perfectly good hot tub could be.  I could spend hours fiddling around in the kitchen gadget section of Williams Sonoma or hell even Wal-Mart for that matter.  Even weirder is that I rarely buy them.  Maybe I just like imagining myself as needing these things.  But convincing me to go takes about a feather's weight of push.

I was tickled to find that some of the kitchen stuff is color grouped.  There was a black section, a white section, a stainless section, a green one, a blue one, a yellow one - even an orange one.  There I found a fat round orange teakettle that made me happy.   I did resist the urge to buy it immediately since I was afraid it would encourage my inner 4 year old decorator self to have at it on the blank canvas of the kitchen and I would end up with a space that resembled nothing so much as it did a box of Crayolas.  Part of me still thinks a Crayola kitchen would be awesome!!  Maybe next time.  

Of course there was a red section.  That had been my goal from the outset.  And even though I was carrying the chubby orange teakettle (There was only one and this being cutthroat Christmas holiday shopping, you don't dare set something you MIGHT want down) I headed over there to check out the red teakettles.   I didn't see any that made me cartwheel down the aisle and I was afraid the Crayola decorator was gonna insist we take the orange one home.  Right about then I spied it in the back of the next to bottom shelf, hidden by lots of its red brethren.  My teakettle.  There was only one of these too, so I snagged it with a quickness.  Red metallic chrome with a cool British-feeling shape.  No annoying whistle.  Yup.  This was the one.  

I put the orange one back on the shelf, the inner child eyeballing it softly as if to say Next time babe.  It's just me and you.  And we both know there will be a next time and I will give in.  But for now the red metallic one sitting on the stove makes my heart sing and of course it makes me think of William Carlos Williams, which is way better than a pile of poo.  

NB - Lest anyone think I wrote that poem from scratch, I am including here the WCW poem I plagiarized.  

The Red Wheelbarrow    by William Carlos Williams

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.