This is our old toaster.

It was never a good toaster.

These days it is a bad toaster, a capricious, willful, and mischievous appliance.

The temperature setting—unreliable even long ago—is now more akin to Bart Simpson playing Lee Carvallo’s Putting Challenge: we suggest “a brief moment in the dappled sunlight of an early spring afternoon” and the toaster changes it to ACTIVE VOLCANO.

That assumes that the lever stays down when pressed, which happens sporadically at best.

---

Twelve years ago, I had a toaster much like this one that was lashing out much like this one. Given the alarming percentage of my diet that came from Pop-Tarts (they’re fortified!), my thoughtful and astute then-girlfriend bought me a new toaster as a gift.

When I unwrapped it, I blurted out, “I kind of thought that maybe we’d be moving in together soonish?”

And that was how we first discussed living together.

“…so then we’d have two toasters.”

Romance is alive and well, folks.

---

The gift toaster was returned.

Her toaster (now the bad toaster) became our toaster, the first our of many.

This is the latest our, a new toaster.

It’s a Breville with the “A Bit More” button, a feature so useful and delightful and obvious-in-hindsight and, now, iconic that Breville doesn’t even put a model number on the box. It’s “the Bit More”.

It is a good toaster.

Today, our tenth anniversary, it is the perfect toaster.

A decade of ours has its challenges. Keeping the needs and feelings of someone else in mind isn’t easy. Like toast, the results are rarely perfect the first time.

My own feelings and needs are capricious, willful, and mischievous. Sometimes I dial in my reactions to “sun-dappled” and land on ACTIVE VOLCANO, all the worse when someone you love is in the eruption.

But life is richer and more vibrant and simply more fun with Kristin here. I go to bed every night thankful for the time we’ve had together so far.

And when I wake up in the morning I’m grateful.

Today, I’ll get a bit more.