Jan 3, 2025 4 min read

Christmas Day brought a houseful of dear ones. There was plenty of room for them, but as bad luck had it, not enough room to store the food for the meals I’d planned to feed them.

This started with a power surge the day before Christmas, a brief zap and then darkness and quiet. Within a few minutes, the lights were back on. I don’t know how many times I went into the refrigerator over the next 24 hours, but my coffee creamer needs alone would suggest it was a lot of times. But because the internal light stayed on, I didn’t notice the cooling part was off.

That second night, I smelled the smell. Opened the fridge and felt the warmth. Opened the freezer and saw the squishy mess: the ice cream and the frozen berries, the chicken tenders and the chuck roast – all of it ruined.

That old fridge and I have been through this once before – last January when a power outage turned it off. A repairman ordered a new part, but before it came in, the fridge turned itself back on and I canceled the part. In that case I could only chock up the outage to a fit of petulance that the GE side-by-side eventually thought better about and corrected course.

Now, I would need a new fridge, but in the meantime I would have to face the challenge of the mini fridge in the garage. At least I could keep some eggs and milk and coffee creamer, enough to get us through for a while.

I’d not used the little fridge for months, and it stood there as a reminder of what lay inside. Last August I put leftovers from my mom’s funeral lunch into the little fridge, but in the jumble of everything happening in those days, I forgot to plug it in. Weeks later I opened the door to find a scene of carnage. Where did all these thousands of bugs come from? It was diabolical. I plugged it in to prevent further yuck, sprayed bleach in there, shut the door and decided I’d deal with it later.

Well, later came because I needed to use it. I opened the garage door, donned my cold weather cycling gear of goggles, mask and gloves and attacked it. Each time I stifled a gag, I reminded myself that others on the planet were having a much worse day than I was, but I had my doubts. I scraped bugs for hours, then removed the shelves and soaked them in hot soapy water in the kitchen sink. Before it was all over, I had to disinfect the kitchen, strip off my clothing and wash it in hot water and leave the garage door open to air it out.

My newly clean little fridge had enough space to get us through the few days while I shopped for a new big fridge. That saga could fill another three columns (who knew black refrigerators were in such demand?), but on New Year’s Eve, three nice men showed up in their truck to deliver a shiny new side-by-side.

But first they had to haul away the old one. For a tense minute there, it looked like it wouldn’t fit through the door, and I wondered if they’d built my house around the fridge.

But they tried another door, and the three men practically squeezed it through. They hoisted it into the truck, closed the door and away they went. I moved my coffee creamer from the garage to the new kitchen fridge. I checked it New Year’s Day. It was cold.