I grew up in a home that always had an electric stove/oven. My only exposure to a gas stove was my grandma Zumalt’s. I remember her lighting her stove/oven with a match. I also remember being told to stand back when she would light it. I was scared of her stove/oven. Her gas was housed in a huge propane tank in her yard and I believe it only needed refilled once or twice a year. We used to sit on top of the propane tank and pretend it was a horse or a blimp or any other imaginative thing.

When David and I were married awhile, we decided to switch from a charcoal grill to a gas grill. I was nervous about the gas tank to the grill. I was scared it would blow up or something. When we arrived in Cameroon, we had both a gas stove/oven and a gas bottle. That’s the only way you can get gas here, it’s sold in bottles and you hook it to your hose, check for leaks and twist it on. At first I was nervous about lighting the stove/oven with a match. I started to like the gas stove/oven, but I didn’t start to love it until our first power outage (which is frequent). I was so happy to have gas because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to cook or heat a meal for our family when the power is off. I have to admit, I’ll really miss my gas stove/oven because it heats things quickly and once you turn off the burner, it’s off – it doesn’t need a lot of time to cool down like electric, but the heat is off and the item stops cooking. I won’t miss the gas bottle though, it still freaks me out and I think I’ll always be scared of it, but maybe it’s a healthy fear.