When I was about 4 years old, my mom bought a brand new, avocado green refrigerator to go with our newly decorated orange and gold kitchen. There was nothing special to this fridge--just a freezer on top and fridge on the bottom. This fridge went with us when we sold the house, moving 235 miles from our old house to our cottage, where it went nicely with the avocado kitchen cupboards. Honestly, I don’t think the thing ever actually died. My parents replaced it with a white fridge from their home, years after my mother had stripped and restained the cupboards, after we had the green shag carpeting torn up and replaced with a light berber. I’m pretty sure it was about 35 years old.
See, that’s how a fridge should be. You should have a fridge so long, you just plain get sick of looking at it. It should be moved to a cottage, then sold at a shockingly low rate, then bequeathed to a young couple who are just thrilled to have enough money to put food into it. A fridge shouldn’t DIE. Especially after five years.
Apparently, our fridge missed the memo. It was a horror from the get-go. I’m beginning to wonder if, when our priest lived down the street, we should’ve had him perform an exorcism on it. That thing never liked us and, truthfully, we never like it, either.
When we selected this particular fridge, it wasn’t because we were so excited about its style or interior design or the amount of storage. We picked it because it was black, it had a water/ice dispenser on the front, and it fit in the space in our kitchen. So, maybe it was us. Maybe we made the fridge feel bad, and that’s why it lashed out at us.
One or possibly two days after the warranty on this fridge expired, it stopped dispensing ice. It still made ice--in fact we couldn’t get it to stop and it overflowed the freezer--but refused to dispense any. A very nice repairman, Chris, came out not once, not twice, but THREE TIMES, trying to figure out what in the world was going on. We became friends, but he couldn’t fix the ice problem. We could have crushed ice--when we pushed the “cube” button--or we could open the freezer, slide out the bin (spilling ice everywhere in the process) and get cubes. This we could live with.
A year or so later, the freezer door started popping. Every time we shut the refrigerator side (it was a side-by-side), the freezer door would just slightly pop open. This was not a handy development, since our Littles were just beginning to use the fridge by themselves. “Shut the freezer!” could be heard screamed across the house many a time, but we also lost several beloved and expensive frozen items (meat, ice cream, Outshine Bars) to the stupid door. We tried adjusting the doors, to no avail. We gave up. With yelling, we could live with this, too.
Then, some shelves broke. One was a side-door shelf, which we ordered on-line and it basically fit. Another was the shelf which held the meat drawer. Hello, duct tape. Apparently, as the Clampetts, we could live with this, too.
The last straw in any affection we had left for the fridge was when, in a freak of nature, the freezer walls began expanding and the drawers no longer fit. We’d be sitting at the dinner table and--“BAM!--a drawer would drop down. Whenever we’d try to slide a drawer out, it would turn into a magic trick attempt, where we’d try to balance the sides just so in order to get the drawer back in. It rarely worked.
Thus, this summer, we really hated this fridge. We would call it bad names. We’d slam the freezer door. We said, “If you were a horse, I’d put you out of your misery.” Our nephew made some suggestions about how to improve the fridge and I made some suggestions about where he could sleep that night. We were not on speaking terms with the fridge. And so--on the summer where my paychecks were significantly docked due to sick leave AND we had a three-week no paycheck due to a weird pay schedule--the fridge quit. Caput. Done. Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.
The Hubby went to buy a new fridge, financed out as far as it could go, including the new “special order black” color (really? BLACK is special order?). I think we should’ve gone looking for the avocado fridge. I bet it could teach this new one a thing or two about keeping a family cool.
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