To me, our old refrigerator was good enough.
True, the ice-maker was jammed
and one drawer had a crack in it.
I could have lived with that
but Katja said
it’s always advisable to replace things
before they go bad.
I learned early on
not to question this line of reasoning.
The new refrigerator
was scheduled to arrive on Thursday.
Wednesday night we emptied out
the many pounds of food.
The freezer contents alone
filled a Coleman ice chest,
two styrofoam coolers,
a large Fed Ex box.
The refrigerator guys
arrived on time in the morning
and dragged our old refrigerator
out to the driveway.
But then, horror of horrors,
the new refrigerator
was one inch too tall for its niche.
“Call your construction guy,”
the delivery man said.
“Sand down the board by one inch.”
We have an old freezer in our basement
and I decided to store the frozen items down there.
When I checked, though, the freezer
was filled to capacity.
Our basement is dark and dingy,
so Katja rarely goes there,
and food can remain in the freezer forever.
It’s like Siberia for frozen foods.
I checked the dates on the packages,
2018, 2019, 2020 — pre-pandemic purchases.
My AI chatbot told me
that meat can stay frozen for years,
but the taste goes bad
after 6 to 12 months.
We started throwing packages away.
Turkey, beef brisket, lobster tails,
steaks, lamb chops, shish kebob.
Hundreds upon hundreds of dollars.
The construction guy came the next morning
and promptly pulled off the wooden bar
that had blocked the refrigerator.
No sanding needed,
With our new refrigerator in place,
we started filling it up.
We’d thrown so much away
that it actually looked reasonably stocked
and not crammed to the gills.
The new start of a sensible
though temporary food phase in our life.