I was cleaning my pantry, tossing long-expired items, a task that simultaneously fills me with joy (Cleanliness! Order!) and despair (Waste! Landfills!), when I picked up a slender bottle of rosemary-infused olive oil I'd purchased fifteen-plus years ago at a farmer's market and hadn't used in about fourteen and wondered: Will this olive oil still be in my pantry when I'm dead? No expiration date: I should use this olive oil, I thought, knowing I would not. Despite the lack of an expiration date, the olive oil's age bothered me. Dust had furred the bottle's head and shoulders. I eyed with suspicion the woody bits of rosemary floating inside, like lawn debris my dog's fur deposits on our sofa. Still, after washing the bottle, I placed it back into the pantry—until, that is, about two weeks later when I googled "Does olive oil expire?" and learned that once opened, olive oil is best used within a year. Reluctantly, I dug the bottle out again, emptied it into a plastic Tupperware container someone had once sent home with my son. It had held a slice of blue-frosted birthday cake topped with rainbow sprinkles and still smelled slightly of sugar. I dropped the Tupperware into the garbage bin, washed out the olive oil bottle and deposited it into the recycling. But upon doing so, I fixated on the knife block on my kitchen counter. Would this knife block be the knife block I died owning? I did not particularly like this knife block. It had been a wedding gift many years ago. Since, the handle of the chopping knife had lost its casing, exposing the metal skeleton. Handling the knife now was unpleasant, like caressing an emaciated animal. When I lifted the knife block, one sharp tip poked out the bottom of its slot, like the crown of a toe from a hole in a sock. Other items in my kitchen I had good reason to believe would not still be around when I expired: the coffee maker, for instance. I can't tell you how many coffee makers we've owned over the years. Six? They're always going haywire. The current toaster was our third toaster. Same reason. And while I despaired thinking about all those broken machines in their mass graves, not to mention the cost of replacing them ad infinitum, I found a strange comfort in my near certainty that I wouldn't die in the presence of this coffee maker or this toaster, that they would not have the satisfaction of peering down at this cold corpse. That's what I was thinking when my gaze fell upon our dining table, another relic, like the knife block, from the genesis of my marriage. "Dining" is the wrong word. We eat most of our meals in front of the television these days. The so-called dining table functions as our child's storage and workspace. It's where he does his homework, listens to D&D podcasts, shushes us as he and his friends joyfully slay the undead. Maybe if I liked this table, I would mind more, but I realize I haven't liked this table in years. I could point to the scratches and stains and gunk as evidence as to why, but if I'm being honest, what's really to blame is something my mother-in-law said. My husband and I were newly married, and we had just bought this house, our first house (will it be our last?). We had just bought this dining table, as well as much of the other furniture. My mother-in-law was visiting our new home for the first time, and she commented on the "hodgepodge of aesthetics." She singled out my dining table. I don't remember what precisely she said about the table, but the gist was I had chosen poorly. Of all the things people have said to me over the years that my brain has sorted through each night as I've slept—deciding what to keep, what to throw away—this was one of the memories my brain chose to clutch tightly in its stupid, sweaty palms. My brain decided, and maintains, that this criticism about a table I once quite liked from a person I have never much liked is useful information. No doubt my mother-in-law's criticism would outlast my dining table. I suspected my mother-in-law's criticism would outlast me. I envisioned a future in which, like my string of coffee makers, I am broken beyond repair, but not dead yet: neurons still frantically whispering to each other my shame.


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