The Klipsk shelving unit, oh, yeah.

Hemlig hat boxes. Yes.

The street outside my high-rise was sparkling and scattered with all this.

The Mommala quilt-cover set. Design by Tomas Harila and available in the following:

Orchid.

Fuschia.

Cobalt.

Ebony.

Jet.

Eggshell or heather.

It took my whole life to buy this stuff.

The easy-care textured lacquer of my Kalix occasional tables.

My Steg nesting tables.

You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug.

Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.

Until I got home from the airport.

The doorman steps out of the shadows to say, there's been an accident. The police, they were here and asked a lot of questions.

The police think maybe it was the gas. Maybe the pilot light on the stove went out or a burner was left on, leaking gas, and the gas rose to the ceiling, and the gas filled the condo from ceiling to floor in every room. The condo was seventeen hundred square feet with high ceilings and for days and days, the gas must've leaked until every room was full. When the rooms were filled to the floor, the compressor at the base of the refrigerator clicked on.

Detonation.

The floor-to-ceiling windows in their aluminum frames went out and the sofas and the lamps and dishes and sheet sets in flames, and the high school annuals and the diplomas and telephone. Everything blasting out from the fifteenth floor in a sort of solar flare.

Oh, not my refrigerator. I'd collected shelves full of different mustards, some stone-ground, some English pub style. There were fourteen different flavors of fat-free salad dressing, and seven kinds of capers.