Refrigerators I Have Known

This has got to be one of the more unusual choices for blog comment, but I bought a new fridge this week and I’m excited about it. We remodeled our kitchen about two years ago and, at that time, I picked out the perfect refrigerator. However, our old refrigerator was still working fine and it seemed wasteful somehow to buy a new one when the old one had no problems.
So this week my sister’s "garage fridge" went out and she was looking to buy something used and I said, "Take mine. PLEASE, take mine."
I’ve had several of these big, hulking indispensable appliances over my lifetime. When I lived with my parents, my mom’s still required defrosting. A task that was less than fun, but gave me such a feeling of accomplishment when all the ice build up was finally gone. Not so much that I’d want to do it again. I’m sure it’s one of those tasks, like childbirth or writing a novel, that only seems more interesting in retrospect.
My very own first refrigerator was bought as the Scratch & Dent sale. My husband and I moved it in ourselves. We’d just closed on the house the day before and we owned a bed and the new refrigerator. That was enough to get by for quite a while. The box it came in went into the dining room, covered with a nice cloth, it was our first table. And it worked very well.
The thing about refrigerators, if you think about it, is to keep things fresh. Without them the milk sours, the meat rots and the vegetables have to be eaten when you cook them or you throw them out. Now we just stick it all in the fridge and we have problem free leftovers, potential breakfasts, lunches and dinners always available. Not to mention the cold glass of iced tea on a hot summer’s afternoon.
I wish that if was that easy to keep our jobs and our relationships fresh. Wouldn’t it be great if we never got stuck doing the same things, saying the same things, arguing over the same old ground?
I remember when my dad broke his leg, I was forced into a pretty rigorous schedule of daily care for both my parents. It was amazing really, how quickly my mother and I got back to exactly the same patterns of interaction we’d had when I was sixteen. She would criticize the things I did, because it was not the way she would have done them. And I would seethe with silent resentment. That was definitely a relationship gone very stale.
I’m not big on confrontations. I hate blow-ups, especially family ones. But sometimes I think you’ve just got to do something, anything, to shake things up.
For us, well my dad got better and my folks were back on their own again. Without the daily contact, Mom and I were able to have a more reasoned, amiable mother/daughter thing. By the end of her life, I think we were okay.
I wish I could call her and tell her about my new refrigerator. She’d be excited too. And she’d want to hear all the details.