FridgeFotos: Hot Meets Cold

My appliances: Chambers stove, Thermador oven, Big Chill fridge
(front and side), photos © 2010 by ybonesy. All rights reserved.






Chambers, Thermador, Big Chill
hot, hot, cold
duck, duck, goose

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PRACTICE: My Refrigerator – 20min

My refrigerator looks old but it’s not. We bought it this year, from a company in Boulder, Colorado, that makes retro appliances. Our fridge is a crisp white, matches the old Chambers stove, which really is old. Both have rounded edges. The fridge has a Whirlpool motor and doesn’t make a whole lot of sound, not the way some old fridges do. But I guess that’s because ours isn’t old; it’s new. Most importantly, it fits into the predefined space for the fridge, a space that happens to have been designed in the 1950s, when the house was built. Which means it won’t fit a year 2010 refrigerator, even if we wanted one.

Which we don’t. No, our retro fridge is a handsome appliance. It makes me think about Pablo Neruda’s sensuous Oda a las cosas. Ode to things. Our refrigerator is shiny, and the name of the company that manufactured it appears on a nameplate with retro cursive handwriting, the kind that evokes images of old majestic cars from the 1950s. Buick. Cadillac. Chevrolet.

Honestly, I don’t even know what the majestic cars were back then. I was born in 1961, but most of my memory is set in the 1970s. I suppose this fridge of ours is reminiscent of June and Ward Cleaver, but I like to think it could also have fit in the home of the Brady Bunch. You know, Alice, the maid, and how she wore that blue dress with the white apron, and the six kids, three boys and three girls, all the exact same age, who often filed down the stairs and ended up in the kitchen, hungry.

I bet when they looked in their fridge they found things like big Kosher dill pickles. Mom always bought us some generic brand pickle, not the crispy Koshers that I buy for the girls. Although when I was a kid, we ate our generic pickles without complaint, and when we finished them off, we drank the pickle juice. And we ate carrots that we peeled and dipped in white vinegar, with salt.

Our fridge, it gives me a good feeling. I guess because it’s such a perfect thing. Why did fridges have to change so much anyway? A few years ago, when we were doing a home remodel, Jim and I went refrigerator shopping. The fridges were so complex. There was the SubZero and the Viking, and the way the salesmen talked about appliances, you would have thought we were buying cars. I think you could keep different parts of the refrigerator cooler than other parts, the way in new cars you can heat one person’s side yet leave the other person at a lower temperature, and the kids can watch movies in the back while your car tells you how to navigate to the grocery store. So it goes with fridges. You want apples at a temperature where it doesn’t hurt your teeth to bite into them yet they stay crisp for weeks? I bet newfangled fridges can do that for you.

Our refrigerator is new but it’s humble. It looks good, and for someone like me, often the way it looks is more important than what it does. It’s not because I’m shallow, although it’s certainly within my repertoire to be shallow. But in this case it’s a visual thing. Jim’s functional, but even he seems to enjoy the new fridge. It is wide on the inside, not too many shelves. We need to bend down lower than with the more sophisticated fridge that we bought for the kitchen remodel but couldn’t use in our new house because, well, our new house is actually an old house.

Maybe I love our refrigerator because it reminds me of days when I ate cheese and mayonnaise sandwiches on soft bread. Not Gruyere or dill Havarti, but plain old yellow cheese. Before we knew that mayonnaise would clog your arteries and that soft bread would make you soft, too, and when the only people who ate chewy bread was the woman in the Nude Drawing class who wore her long braids in two buns on each side of her head, and the only way she got chewy bread was by making it herself.



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PRACTICE — My Refrigerator – 20min

My refrigerator is nothing special. It’s short and squat, a just-right size that fits nicely into its spot under the cabinets. Our kitchen is the size of a breadbox. So the fridge fits into the breadbox. I’ve always lived in small, crowded spaces. The rambler I grew up in in Pennsylvania housed eight kids and two adults with three bedrooms and one bath. In small spaces, there is always a noise to be heard, the crackle of laughter, the bang of a knee on the step rail, the Oldsmobile station wagon pulling up the hilly driveway. Our fridge was always full of good food, homemade meatloaf or Southern barbecue, gallons of whole milk and sweet tea, fresh eggs and bacon, cheese and a variety of meats for Dagwood sandwiches.

My fridge is the same way. In Fall, we keep it well stocked. Red grapes, sweet October apples, horseradish mayo, pulpy OJ, bottles of fresh water, pork chops thawing on a plate to grill for dinner. I’m getting hungry. I associate a full fridge with nurturing, the way mothers nurtured when they worked at home and had time to devote to domesticity. I don’t know how they do it these days. What I really want to say about refrigerators is that they used to be heavy steel boxes with chunks of ice that had to be replaced on a daily basis. When I was driving by the old Georgia house with Mom, she pointed out the porch where she used to rock me as a baby. She said they had an icebox then, made a point of remembering. Because iceboxes were work. And keeping baby bottles fresh, milk cold, was something women thought a lot about in the 1950’s.

Simple things. What is simple has changed. I grew up calling a refrigerator an icebox. I don’t know when I switched to fridge. Before magnetics, the doors were clunky with mechanical latches that you had to push hard to shut. There were no ice dispensers, crispers, water that flowed through a tube in the door. If I had my way, I’d order red appliances. A big red front loading washer, maybe Bosch or Kenmore. Gas dryer to match. Red stove, red refrigerator. Not tomato red. But the dark red of a maple leaf like the one I saw at the writing retreat last weekend at Gale Woods Farm.

Gale Woods Farm is over 400 acres of what was once private farmland, donated to Three Rivers Park system by the family. We were writing about place, walking to the mounds, crunching through maple and oak where the forest meets the prairie. It’s a working farm with sheep, chickens, cows, farm equipment strewn about the property. What would it have been like to grow up there before the time of refrigerators? With root cellars and iceboxes and men (maybe a few women) who went out and sawed chunks of ice from frozen lakes to sell locals so they could keep leftovers cold. I don’t want to go back. I only want to imagine.

And underneath that imagining is a quiet place. A simpler place. Not better. Just simpler. I would read by candlelight, work in the daylight hours, go to bed when I was tired. I’d send letters through the mail with 6-cent stamps edged with bad cursive, stumble out to check on the dogs with a kerosene lantern, delight in the way the snow flickered down through the burr oaks and maples when the Moon was full. Inside, my wet boot tracks would leave frosty prints on the burlap mat, the window panes would creep forward into the fog between warmth and cold. The icebox would not hum when I reached in to pull out glass jars of milk, a crock of butter to lather on homemade bread. I’d shut the door against hollow walls of tin, walk over to my writing desk, take out the fountain pen and get to work.

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