The Anniversary Present

A few days ago I told you about my wife’s favorite tool, her trusty rusty smoker/grill/fire pit, and how she finds it relaxing to have a fire. Son, Tong, had given it to her a few years ago and she has made it earn its keep around here. In that entry, I told you about how we wound up having to come back to the house to grill because we couldn’t find a place and how it all worked out fine and we had the whole place to ourselves except for a brief interruption when son-in-law came home. Well, he had an ulterior motive for coming home.

He wasn’t expecting to find us there, cooking. We exchanged a few pleasantries about how the grilling part had been kind of a bust so we decided to come home for a while. He left and we left and went on our happy way. We normally put out the fire by closing the lids as the lack of oxygen extinguishes it quite nicely. There is nothing open in case a wind comes up to stir the ashes.

As an aside, that’s how many of our wildfires here in Colorado start. Inexperienced campers who think their fire is out and that the ashes can’t do anything. We often get high winds in the mountains and it blows the ashes away, exposing embers underneath. I’ve showed kids on more than one occasion how to blow away the ashes and restart the fire the next day. People leave their campsites without checking. Now, back to where I was.

He and Youngest Daughter had a plan. They came back and went to work. He had some sanding blocks and began working on it. They carefully emptied it out and did a bunch of work. It’s easier to show than to describe, really. When we came home and went out in the back yard we found this:

It was all cleaned out, sanded down, had new wood on everything, a new grill and it was painted with heavy-duty heat-resistant Rustoleum paint.

It was a thoughtful and much-appreciated gift. Thanks, Abby and Josiah, for making a nice wrap-up for a beautiful weekend.