My new oven is sleeker than the one that has so well served me over the past decade. It’s a new knight in updated armor. No rust. Fresher face. How will it hold up?

Ten years ago while waiting for a replacement (for the even older “old oven”), I complained and whined and drove myself crazy. A week without baking felt spiritually demoralizing; levains refreshed, dough retarded, rusks gnawed in protest, but nothing to do with them. I remember watching a lot of food tv shows and cursing the latest batch of uppity blowhards, all with gleaming new kitchens.

Then the oven arrived, gorgeous and absurdly more glamorous than anything I had ever owned. Now I’ve bought virtually the same oven again. Ten years, and the old one simply wore out, the way things do, the way things are built to degrade.  Now I have a new one.

The world doesn’t get that same refresh. It just accumulates — more blowhards, more wear, less shine — while I stand in my kitchen with a shiny new machine, feeling like I’ve upgraded and downgraded at the same time.

I don’t have a tidy conclusion. Just an oven, a bit more elegant than the last one, and a decade sitting in the space between the two purchases — some of it good, some of it worth grieving, and the rust, it turns out, was never in the appliance. Let’s bake!!!!!