“I’ve ordered an electric garbage can.”

“What?” I replied, lips drawn tight, brows furrowed.  It was not the first time I’d pooh-poohed the idea of yet another electrified thing in the house, living, as I was, with an electrician who’d become an appliance guy.  

Signs were there; we’d met when he’d fixed my fridge and during our courtship, he’d presented me with both a half sized freezer and a bar fridge for my condo’s bedroom closet.  

“So you can have cold water in the night,” he’d said when I questioned the fridge. I never asked why I might need a bag of frozen peas at midnight. I’m sure he could have justified it.  It was sharp contrast to the pre-Jack me who’d ground coffee beans in a hand-grinder every morning. 

Cohabiting, I had even less say about the overloaded electrical system.  

“Look,” he waved his phone in front of my face. I felt queasy with the fast movement and tried to make out the garbage can advertised on Facebook he was showing me. “You just move your hand over the lid and it opens.” He grinned like he’d sliced bread for the first time. “And then it closes on its own.” He continued triumphantly. “It will fit between the wall and the dishwasher.”  

“It’s too big,” I responded, ever keen to find a way to quash this man’s enthusiasm for killing the planet one unnecessary appliance at a time. 

“I checked the specs.” He was forever checking the specs of things. “It is the perfect size. It will be here next week.” 

These were the heady pre-COVID days when Chinese manufactured items arrived as if by magic and sure enough, it was sitting beside its cardboard box in the middle of the living room when I arrived home from work a few days later.  

“It’s bigger than the ad said,” he reported. I should have been suspicious, because he sounded surprisingly untroubled. 

“Great! You can return it!,” I replied. 

 “No, I’m building a niche,” he said, pulling me proudly into the kitchen to show me his afternoon labours. In the wall between the dishwasher and the butcher block table where we often ate when it was just us, he’d already cut a hole between two studs and was busy drywalling the space he’d created. He’d already installed some extra trim he found in the basement and had roughed in an electrical outlet. 

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding!” By now I was laughing. While it was next to impossible to get him to build a fence around my tomato patch to protect against squirrels, for his own projects, he was a man of great and immediate action.  

He grinned back. “You’ll see. You’re going to love this.” 

And I did.  I used that garbage can happily, so much so that I started to expect other cans to pop open on command.  When Jack died, I continued to enjoy my house of mod-cons.  Slowly, though, the appliances started to fail me — first the dishwasher, the appliance I’d requested immediately upon moving in and by far my most beloved. It stopped working just a couple of weeks after Jack’s funeral, and having it replaced was one of the most grief-filled events of those early days. I bought one through a friend of Jack’s who had it delivered by someone who could install it too. The installer knew our fridge-meeting story from our mutual contact and thought it funny to proposition me. (People can be such idiots around the grieving.)  My dryer died a few weeks later and I air-dried a full year before I had the strength to enter an appliance store in February 2020.  I couldn’t make it through a second winter with crunchy towels. The washer conked out a couple of weeks into COVID and I ordered the washer to go with my new dryer over the phone just before supply chain interruptions would have had me wearing filthy clothes for months. 

The electrified garbage can gobbled up my trash for another year until it, too, had its fill. I relegated it to the back porch to be my recycling collector, where I lift the lid each time, using the energy produced by my body rather than stealing energy from a struggling planet.

The garbage can niche, though, was the source of much debate when I was planning my updated kitchen. I’ve written about my winter 2022 reno project prompted by my decision to build and move into a laneway suite and rent out my house. The goal — to create a house that would attract a certain type of tenant: professional, likely millennial, drawn to simplicity, clean lines, inoffensive colours. Having a random niche in the kitchen wall, fully trimmed, and with its own electrical outlet, seemed a little too weird to my design team and even my renovator. Because of its storied origin, though, I just couldn’t have it closed up. Instead, it’s painted the Tempe Star of the wall it’s on, and will have its own set of shelves, yet to be installed. What millennial professional wouldn’t respond well to a charging station in the kitchen? 

That’s the long-term plan.  In the meantime, the kitchen doubles as a large dog crate. Bidi and Molly are corralled there when I’m not with them because Molly, dear, dear Molly, came to us not having been schooled in the niceties of house-living.  That is to say, she pees and poohs as much indoors as out. I love her anyway, although I would love her a tiny bit more if she could be broken of this. If it’s still possible at her age, I don’t know the trick, so I live with it. Mostly she uses a pee pad, which I can more or less live with. 

But here’s the fun part - Molly has discovered niche-peeing.  Every day or two, I come downstairs in the morning to a clean pee pad but a glistening niche floor.  The paper towel I use to mop it up is tell-tale yellow. To the Mo-pologists among you, no, it isn’t Bidi doing this. Bidi would be as horrified to piddle inside as I would be. On a particularly banner morning, there was a Molly-poop in the niche, laid dead centre and perfectly formed.  Poop-art, Warhol might have said. Yes, Molly has found her niche, and it’s Jack’s.   A multi-purpose niche, as it turns out.

If you like what you’re reading, there is no greater compliment than to become a subscriber. Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Usually one each week - I promise I won’t spam you every day! (I wish I were that productive!)