Refrigerator of Natural Science

 According to the microwave, it's 88:88 o'clock, a time found in Brobdingnagian clocktowers; I've unplugged several appliances to clean under them, and haven't reset the green blinking displays yet. There's more unplugging to be done, so for the moment A Real Clock of economical plastic from IKEA measures the hours.

And finally comes the day to clean out the refrigerator.  It's a dedicated sweetie pie that has been working secondhand for me since 1995, almost twenty years.  Sure, no light inside, and the freezer is a manual defrost that does not get cold enough to keep ice cream solid, but it was given to me by a good person and those happy wishes have kept the appliance going just fine for me.  I do have a small chest freezer, as I am a conservator of sour cherries and on sale meat; this is where the rare ice cream carton lands and hides till I find it.  It is my next project to thaw and arrange.

The ice and permafrost have built up in the upper regions of Siberia to the point where the flimsy plastic inside door won't shut.   Only a couple of defrostings happened over the winter; once a week is the very best for smooth sailing and quick finishes.  However, I have not been diligent, for many excellent reasons, and so here we are. Tool checklist: rubber gloves, a hairdryer, and a big whomping flathead screwdriver are lined up on the counter and I unplug this not too large refrigerator, surveying the white layers of ice.  Plastic packages of spinach and peas are right on top; one gets tossed and the other is put into the microwave for supper.  Mystery enters and swishes its cape, for now there is nothing but mounds of fluffy ice.  I chop some out and make a snowball.

I find a bag of the sour cherries, frozen parsley, lima beans, blueberries and bacon.  A pack of bacon.  Another pack of bacon. Another pack of bacon.  It must have been on sale.  A plastic bag, the sort that you bring groceries home in, partly waggles the not-locked-in-ice part and is squishy.  It's a bag of wool scarves;  oh right, cold storage, as it were.  Years ago a woolen sweater became fodder for clothes moths, so now I am cautious; this is why I keep clothing in my freezer. Only I forget where I put it;  my favorite scarf is then missing, "I leeffffttt it somewhere".  Who would ever think of looking in the freezer for their clothes?  Not me.  Only in spring, just like lost winter mittens in the backyard appear during thaws, the missing are resurrected on Defrosting Day.

The packages have been chopped out and put in a box wrapped in a blanket, and serious work begins; I snap on the gloves, plug in the sturdy hairdryer, and turn on the heat, aiming for the back of the compartment.  The hot air then swirls around and is able to soften everything up; if you do a spot by spot method, you will, my friend, be hacking at ice till St. Swithin's Day, which is July 15th.
                   
                                  'St. Swithin's day if thou dost rain 
                                   For forty days it will remain 
                                  St. Swithin's day if thou be fair 
                                  For forty days 'twill rain nae mair.'

Help yourself out by leveraging the blade of the screwdriver at areas of perceived weakness, chop carefully through the rack which holds the freezing coils; glaciers break and are caught by the drawer designed to do so.  The drawer.  This drawer has a flap that says "Winter position" and "Summer position," and if that happens in moments of clarity, well, fine.  But I'm not staying up nights worrying about it.

As the drawer catches the thawing chunks and melt, I tussle them out one-handed as the drawer still is immobilized by ice.  Stalactites and stalagmites are tossed into the kitchen sink to dissolve and why is this one brown?  Brown ice is not a good sign of anything, yet more appears, browner.  Stygian.  I trace it back to a plastic container with a cracked bottom that once held beef stock, and has now mostly emptied itself into the catch all.  I remove the mess and soap it out, scrubbing corners with a tooth brush; almost finished.  The ice is gone, the coils are clean, and finally, the Glacial Age has subsided.

I put surviving food packets back, toss the wheat grass, congealed spinach, and the door now shuts, just lovely; I look at the refrigerator shelves, which have the appearance of a Jenga tower.  Things are crammed in stacks, so it is to begin from the top down; after the frozen mammoths found in the freezer, this job turns out to be a lesson in natural sciences.  This grey thing, for example.  Round, hard, a rock in the fridge?  Welp, there's a stem end, andddd, it's a lime!  Technically.

There's a canister of whipped cream that was shoved over the edge of the wire shelf, circa April 2012; eggs from last year, two plastic bags that now hold produce that I don't know what it is, desquamation from the outside in has done a favor and reduced fibers to liquid.  Oh come on, you never forgot there was broccoli back in there?  A brown paper bag of potatoes has grown fingerlike roots, and there are foot long onion leaves growing from defunct bulbs; carrots have begun rooting and sending up shoots.  This is biology, stubborn life within the Kingdom of Flora; let me next introduce you to the Kingdom of Fungi in one word: cheese.

Now cheese is a dairy base, the softer ones such as Brie, or the blue ones, such as Roquefort, have been given over to mold to flush mycelium through the curds (the blue stuff is Penicillium), or form an outside crust that softens the inner loveliness.  Sideline:  yeast (fungi) makes the dough rise; top with Brie (softened by fungi), add mushrooms (fungi) and you have the Kingdom of Fungi Pizza.  Neat, yes?  Yes?  Anyways, there is good cheese, and moldy cheese that Dr. Jonas Salk would be proud of; it seems the supermarket brand is intact, yet the organic local variety has more blue fuzz than a 70's shag rug.

So did you know that pickles can get moldy?  I didn't.  But look, we are on the bottom shelf, and all that's left are jars of jelly with barely one spoonful left; I don't even care for jelly that much, but am loath to throw food away.  Obviously.  Toss, toss, toss.  The bins at the bottom are emptied and washed in the sink, everything is wiped down, and this looks so good that I should take a photo except that posting a photo of your fridge's insides is pathetic.

A refrigerator is a repository for food, all food, any food, and it can stay there for years;  lord have mercy if you ever get inside a restaurant walk-in fridge.  Don't ever order mousse, although I think that craze disappeared; I can give you an excellent recipe that won't upset your stomach, putting it politely.  If you do indulge and don't get ill, that's because it's been made from a powdered mix you add milk to, like instant pudding except we will charge you $7 'cause we grated chocolate over it.

In one "restaurant" you could not throw anything away without the manager's approval, even if it was starting to look like a troll doll and spreading spores to it's neighboring stored menu items.  In all restaurants I ever worked in, (except Chicago), if something landed on the floor, it was picked up and redished.  We were to save cherry tomatoes from customer's plates, wash them, and plop them in the next salad.  And butter for lobster or garlic bread?  Scraped also from plates and melted down.  Complain and send a steak back?  If you're the hated owner of the place, the cooks will drop it on the floor and stomp it a few times.  They put cigarettes in your trout's mouth for the server to pick out.  Do not think this doesn't happen, I can call in witnesses.

When I moved back to Buffalo and worked at a chain restaurant, I was opening line cook because I knew how to put the complicated soft serve machine together.  Were the parts ever washed?  Mostly nope, unless I raised Cain with the dishwashers.  Taken apart, put in a tub of water to soak overnight, not even rinsed off before being reassembled, with curds of soured mix coating the springs and widgets.  But anyway, the part that I was getting to was the rats.  Flip on the lights, and they would run over the Belgian waffle irons, as no one in their right mind would be able to throughly clean six of the things and get all the bits, so it was a waffle fest for the vermin.  Uh, I think I've gone on too long, and best advice is to stay away from chain restaurants. There are never enough staff hired to take care of all the Board of Health rules, and an independent owner has a lot more to lose and probably cares about the place.

Except the last guy I worked for, he thought he was Frank Sinatra's evil twin; if you didn't want another drink after he offered, he'd put a gun to your head.  I don't miss working in restaurants, but it has come full circle with my refrigerator patiently holding jars of applesauce from 1997.   Appreciate your own cooking, my friend.  Slapping peanut butter on bread counts, for you know that only you have been licking the side of the jar with your fingers, and not sharing it with something that has a pink snakey tail and squeaks.

The rainstorms have subsided, and everything that lives outside has had a drink of water; everyone inside has been served.  Come on over and see my clean refrigerator, it now goes with the rest of the kitchen and is humming away.

Be gentle, be kind; sleep well and deep.  Good heart, I can just tell.