The family fridge was mine to clean. Daddy wasn’t domestic. And mother wasn’t home. So I cleaned the fridge, the contents of which more suited to science experiments than to eating, really. And there was that time that dad tried to get me to sell worms by the roadside so that the bottom drawers of the fridge were filled with Styrofoamed worms.

My dad’s mother lived in a big drafty rusty-sided farmhouse. Her house smelled always of industrial soap, citrus bleach, baking, and melons. And for the longest time she kept a wonderfully antique fridge, a giant looming Kelvinator. And even when I was young, it seemed like a laboring old behemoth. But for its largeness, and its antiquity, it was wonderful. In her fridge, my grandma kept watermelon for the boys and the farmhands, and she chilled her banana cream pies which she made specially for me without the banana bits.

In my second year of university, when I first moved out, my one roommate always stocked at least one case of beer in the bottom shelf. Black Label. Clever advertising revived that brand for about three years. It must have been then. My other roommate, who, delightfully, was never home, used the fridge only for keeping his Mary Jane in the butter drawer.

I’ve got a new Whirlpool. It’s shiny and white. They ripped out the innards of my old fridge today and wheeled it away. My sad old bubble gum blue Westinghouse is now out back. They ripped the door off the front. It looks terrifically naked and cold out back in the snow. I couldn’t help but go look at it tonight when I walked my dog. It looks so abandoned, like someone’s sick pet.

Sure it didn’t really work anymore. Sure it froze my insulin. Sure I had to defrost it every month. Sure, at least three times, I asked my building to take it away. But I don’t like looking at it so, so cold and decimated. Funny that I should feel bad that a fridge looks cold. I wonder if a phoenix can get a fever.

Still, my new fridge is shiny. And it doesn’t have scratches and scars. And, no, it wouldn’t remember the moon landing.

I hope they take my old fridge away soon, though. I shouldn’t like to continue to look at it.

SS