Thinking
Outside the Icebox
Moving to northern Maine meant leaving behind
a nice refrigerator. Oh, we hadn’t actually owned it or anything, but still,
those vast glass shelves and that spacious freezer had plenty of room for all
the essentials: Brigham’s Mississippi Mud ice cream, cappuccino-silk pie, and
lots of root beer. Would the new fridge hold all of that? I wondered.
We moved to a little house in Linneus where
the new fridge was really an old fridge—harvest gold, gaunt, and as loud as a
mosquito in your ear. The refrigerator held what we needed, but as it turned
out, two-thirds of the essentials weren’t available at the local grocery store,
anyway.
Soon the men from Sears arrived with a new
refrigerator. One fellow wanted the little fridge we were replacing; he said it
would be the perfect place to stash his soda when he was hanging out in his
garage. But I was happy for a roomier, quieter fridge once again.
Two years later we moved to an off-grid cabin
in Smyrna, and we went without a refrigerator for six weeks, which wasn’t all
that bad considering the cabin was only 16’ x 24’—who had room for a fridge?
But I wondered how things would go without one. As it turned out, eggs and
bread didn’t need refrigeration if you ate them fast enough; we had lots of
canned goods, too. Cheese molded quickly that July, but we still had plenty of
food to eat.
Eventually we borrowed an old gas
refrigerator, but its freezer had enough room for maybe one pint of Ben &
Jerry’s Chunky Monkey. Besides that, the fridge went through 100 pounds of
propane every week. When it failed the soap-bubble test, we decided to drag it
onto the porch and buy a fridge that ran on kerosene instead.
The freezer was bigger than the previous one,
but for some reason kerosene fridges run slim. Maybe that is because the
average person uses one at a camp for the weekend. Not our situation. How were
we going to cram two-weeks’ worth of groceries into a fridge that small? I
wondered. But somehow it held what mattered, and it did a fine job of keeping
the milk and meat cold. The only problem was that every few days the burner
would emit a noxious odor to announce that its wick needed to be cleaned once
again.
These days we’re back to using an electric
fridge—white, wide, and odorless. But I noticed something about all of those
refrigerators we owned. Somehow—no matter what kind or size of fridge—we always
had enough room for what we really needed. And when we went without a fridge
altogether, we still had plenty to eat—even if I had to learn what actually qualified
as essential.
