Frankly, Scallop, I don't give a clam.

The tale goes something like this:

In December, the Melchior’s had an unfortunate accident involving their furnace. Oil leaked all over our downstairs, forcing the repair and demolition of a 3 year old addition built on to our house. The odor created by oil is amazingly difficult to remove, and our insurance company sent professionals who worked for many months on the problem – including the flushing of cinder block, replacement of studs and drywall, and the complete removal of two full rooms of carpeting.

Good Friday marked the near end of the months long project. The last piece of new carpet was laid, the strong oil odor had been replaced by the smell of fresh paint and the workers on the cleaning crew - that we now know so well - were beginning to say their goodbyes.

On Saturday, I decided to clean out the refrigerator. To you neat nuts, that may seem harmless, but we’re talking about ME today. There were things in that fridge that I could no longer identify (including what appeared to be a seafood medley) and so I figured that the day between Good Friday and Easter was the perfect day to get rid of the dead to make way for new life. After all, I know how the story ends.

Easter Sunday, we went to church. I love Easter Sunday. My hope is built on nothing less, and frankly, my hope is of HUGE proportions. We came home so that I could prepare pineapple stuffing to take to my mother’s house for dinner (I am guessing that pineapple stuffing is a Pennsylvania Dutch thing, but I don’t know). As I mixed and scooped in the kitchen, my white faced husband entered.

“What’s the worst thing I could tell you right now?” was exactly what he said.

Now, I tried to use my context clues. He was pale, but not weeping. He was not reaching for the phone to call 911. There did not seem to be a young beautiful woman who still had her figure standing with him. I did not smell smoke. That pretty much covered it.

“I don’t know. It’s Easter – what could be that bad?” was exactly what I said back.

Apparently, the cleaning crew had inadvertently removed a cap on top of a pipe during their work downstairs. It was a fairly innocent mistake, but the pipe was directly connected to both our dishwasher and our garbage disposal – which, of course, is where I had flushed all the unidentifiable food items from the refrigerator the day before. For 24 whole hours, we did not know that we had an explosion of HUGE proportions beneath us that, yes, had leaked through onto all the new carpeting and work that had been just completed. In the days since, I have found myself longing for the oil smell back. We have discovered something worse.