I’ve worn out another crockpot. The other day the final piece of the press-buttons on the outside of the pot peeled off leaving me no idea how long, or how hot, my food would cook. It was time to retire yet another crockpot. I think I’ve owned four.

As a working mother, coming home after a long day at the office to the smell of someone else cooking dinner was a treat. Two to four days a week the kids had ballet or band practice, my husband might have a meeting, or was working a different shift, and I had worked hard all day. But hungry mouths needed to be fed. And often they were fed by way of the crockpot I had plugged in before leaving for work that morning. (If I remembered to plug it in!)

Nowadays the kids are grown, and my husband and I don’t go out the door to work anymore—we are retired. But dinner still rolls around most nights. And crockpots are still an item you can find on the shelf if you look hard enough. Except when I went shopping.

There were instapots (pressure cookers scare me), air fryers (makes great French fries), and tiny pots to humongous pots. But a medium crockpot eluded me as I wondered down the aisle. There was one on the shelf as a display unit but none in boxes. Sigh. I would go home and order online (something unheard of with my first crockpot). I had grocery shopping to do, and I’d better not buy anything I wanted to cook in a crockpot.

Then as I wondered over near the frozen turkeys, I saw them. A giant display of crockpots! Just there for the picking with the holidays right around the corner.

I shoved the groceries to one side and made way for number five in my grocery cart. I would be able to cook a roast, or pot of soup. It was the first day of fall and many pots of stew or beans were once more in our future.

It’s the little things in life that count—or the medium sized ones.

What are you reading/writing/learning/cooking this week?