Back when I was a young
whippersnapper, our refrigerator (then called an icebox) remained empty most of
the time. I reckon that's because granny couldn't afford to pay the iceman and
what went into the icebox had to be consumed rather quickly before it spoiled.
But, with the advent of the modern refrigerator, empty is certainly a word of
the past.
Come the Holidays, one of my implied chores around our house (meaning that I'm
just about the only one who bravely undertakes the chore) is cleaning out our
refrigerator. This is a considerable undertaking when you take into account
that it is not done very often and that my family is a certified den of pack
rats.
My wife inherited these survival traits from her mother and passed them down to
our daughters. The reason I use the word survival is the fact that quite often
I find things in our refrigerator that must have been stashed there in fear of
a coming famine, a nuclear holocaust, or in anticipation of the end of civilization.
For example, a bowl with half a spoon of peas and a bag with one old scrawny
carrot. A jelly jar with less than a teaspoon of jelly in it. A butter dish
with enough butter sticking to the sides for one good scrape, and a pack of
bologna with one very lonely slice in it. I am certain these items were stored
there to hold starvation from our door in a just-in-case situation.
During my latest mission to clean the fridge, which had to be done before
Easter season so room could be made for a shopping binge to get all those
goodies for our holiday feasts, I ran into some remarkable things.
In the freezer I discovered one fossilized pork chop, two bagels the
consistency of ceramic pottery, a half melted tub of ice-cream that I
remembered buying for Memorial Day eight months earlier, a spoon (with nothing
on it), and some odds and ends I simply could not identify. I was lucky this
time; I've previously found a pair of eyeglasses, set of earrings, a used
Band-Aid, a collapsed tennis ball, a new writing pen, A TV Remote (that's where
it went), a golf ball (I don't golf) and other unusual items in the freezer.
Moving down to the more difficult mission of the refrigerator in general, which
was so full I couldn't see the shelves or back walls, I strengthened my resolve
and charged ahead like a good trooper.
Some items I removed I cannot even attempt to describe. There was one jar in
the back, the label long since gone, which contained a pungent growth of
mildew, enough to make a ton of penicillin.
My wife must have been collecting pickle jars, for I removed over half a dozen
of them of all sizes. The reason I say jars is that most of them were either
empty or contained one wrinkled pickle or part of a pickle or what may have
once been a pickle.
The salad crisper was the hardest job. I don't know why they call it the
crisper because the things I found there were far beyond any description of
crisp. In fact, just about everything I found I know I had seen in Vietnam, for
it looked as if it had been sprayed with Agent Orange, all slimy and falling
apart.
By the time I finished my odious chore, both the dishwasher and sink was full
of empty dishes and I had filled two large garbage bags with empty jars, boxes,
and unidentifiable items. Some of the left-overs (I think they were once
edible) I gave to the pets, while other items, not even the animals were brave
enough to eat.
When my wife came home to see a sparkling clean and 'empty' refrigerator, her
first remark was, "Did you throw away that crème cheese I was saving?"
What crème cheese? I remember a small block of something that resembled a hairy
bar of soap, but no crème cheese! I was afraid for a second she was going to
ask what happened to that piece of wedding cake I discarded. I couldn't even
remember which wedding it came from.
Could it have been ours from 37 years ago?
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