We were sitting around the dinner table last night when the world exploded. The sound of shattering planets came from somewhere behind me and when I turned to look over my shoulder I fully expected to see an army of celestial soldiers joining battle with the ethereal forces of darkness right there in my back yard.

Instead it turned out that the shelf over the back door and everything that had been on it were strewn and wrecked on the floor of the rear entryway. A half-dozen Mason jars had plunged to the floor with another half-dozen glass drinking jars, where they’d crashed together so cataclysmically that much of the floor in the entryway was ankle-deep in jagged shards of glass. Up until that moment, we’d been sure that Mason jars were all but indestructible.

The force of the explosion threw several shards into the dining room and, even more tragic, one of them managed to spear My Darling B in the foot. She pulled it out easily and with stoic resolve, but was bleeding badly and had to retreat from the scene of after handing me a broom and dustpan in order to clean and dress her wound.

Only five minutes before, I’d been in and out through that back door, starting up a fire in the Weber grill to cook the traditional meal of bratwurst and Polish sausage for our Memorial Day dinner. If my timing had been off by only a few minutes I would’ve gotten one hell of a bonk on the head and probably a row of stitches under the best of circumstances. Under the worst, I probably would’ve been shredded like Chinese chicken.