The Icebox Brigade

Right now, our refrigerator is full. I've been reading about food waste lately and while I grew up with the ironclad rule that food should never be wasted or thrown out, I know that these days I do contribute to the food waste stream. We have fresh produce delivered from a farm to the house every Wednesday and sometimes don't eat it all before it goes bad. Some weeks we even avail ourselves of one of those meal-prep delivery services which makes me feel like an actual cook but sometimes doesn't turn out to our liking.

So the fridge is full, and what a blessing that is. I've known this appliance by many names --- the icebox, the frigidaire, the fridge, the refrigerator. Over the years I've had quite a few. Remembering them today, as I contemplated where to stuff the leftovers from lunch, I realized that they trace the trajectory of my fluctuating economic circumstances.

Things started out ok. When I was 18 and newly married, we rented a furnished apartment specifically set up for servicemembers from the nearby Navy base. That was where I started learning my way around the kitchen, though my husband did most of the cooking. He had a talent for it.

When he got out of service and we started college, money was tight. All our furniture and appliances were second-hand,  as was our series of beater cars.  After a couple of years, I moved out on my own for awhile to live in a student boarding house, the first time I shared a kitchen with 6 other women. It was a never-ending effort to keep tabs on my own food. The fridge, with its limited space, was the hardest to control.

After Andrew was born and his dad and I separated for good, I went on welfare and food stamps to keep life together while I finished college and looked for a job. My upstairs apartment had a small fridge with an undependable thermostat and a freezer just big enough for ice cube trays. I learned to shop every couple of days and was very grateful that breast milk was always at the ready and at the perfect temperature.

Next, I threw resources in with my sister and we rented a small, tattered house together. Garage sales provided appliances, including a stove with 2 working burners and a refrigerator that had to be roped shut. Inconvenient, but at least it worked. Somehow, she forgave me for suddenly packing up to move to California, leaving her to unload all our fine furnishings. 

My second place in San Francisco was another shared space with 5 housemates. We instituted the use of small colored stickers to differentiate refrigerator food for each of the roomies. It sort of worked. Sometimes.

Zig-zagging back to Chicago for awhile, I had a garden apartment with no refrigerator at all, and no hope of affording one. Andrew and I slept on a single floor mattress and ate off of a round cocktail table with 2 metal chairs. That was all of our furniture. But the kitchen had hot water and a stove, so I stopped at the market every day to buy cold things for the styrofoam cooler and somehow we got by.

Moving in with my parents in the Azores gave me all the comforts of home: washer and dryer, a working stove and fridge, and a grandmotherly, Portugese, housekeeper/babysitter who took good care of things --- and of Andrew. 

It actually took until I was well into my forties for me to get a brand new refrigerator for the first time. Same thing with a car. Fifties before I owned a house. You would think, after all this history, that I would never take anything for granted, but that doesn't seem to be the way things go. We live in a country in which poor people having a refrigerator calls their legitimacy into question. It's complicated. What exactly is a luxury and what would be a necessity?  

Jill and I have a fifteen-year-old fridge that is still pumping away for the time being. It's ample for us, even without the bells and whistles I see in Home Depot on the new models. I hope it lasts awhile longer, but I also am pretty sure that when it gives up the ghost we'll be able to go pick out a new one, not shop the second-hand stores. We may not be rolling in dough, but we also don't have to tie the door shut with a rope to keep the cold in. 

And that's the lesson, isn't it? Not everyone is so fortunate.

I remember.