Those are two words you don’t want to use when describing the contents of your refrigerator,  but I’m afraid they are perfectly applicable for our ailing Kenmore.   Kathy went into the freezer yesterday afternoon to get something and found a small lake where ice should have been . . . and everything soggy and completely thawed.   And a quick check of the temperature gauge indicated that the freezer was hovering at a balmy 45 degrees. . .    and the refrigerator was a positively sultry 67 degrees.   As near as we can tell,  the freezer door (it’s one of those freezer drawers below the side-by-side refrigerator on top) was not closed all of the way –  and apparently that heated up the freezer which in turn heated up the refrigerator,  and the rest is history-  or in our case,  history-repeating-itself.  Our old chest freezer out in the garage gave up the ghost a few years back,  and everything in it- including expensive Market Day packages and some Omaha Steaks were ruined.   It’s amazing how something that feels so catastrophic can look like nothing amiss has happened; other than a light bulb not turning on or some unexpected water on the bottom,  it looks fairly normal.  But it is horribly painful first of all to lose an appliance like that-  and second to have all of that wonderful food go to waste.  It’s not so much the expense (although in that instance,  the thought of how much all of that ruined food was worth made us sicker to our stomachs than any case of botulism could have) as just the utter, useless waste.

Anyway, we’re pretty sure that our Kenmore has not died in this instance – it just had something resembling a stroke,  and we’re left with one half (the freezer) seemingly back to normal while the other side (the refrigerator) is pretty much paralyzed.  In fact, although the temperature was 67 degrees when we discovered the problem,  it was amusing to watch the temperature soar even higher as we emptied the refrigerator of its contents with the doors standing wide open.  In about fifteen minutes time,  the temperature had risen to 114 degrees!   (We thought about leaving the doors open a bit longer so we could convert our refrigerator into the world’s smallest and most oddly configured Sauna.)    And although the freezer eventually returned to its proper temperature of zero,  the refrigerator seems stuck at 74 degrees with no sign whatsoever that it ever intends to resume its formal chilly ways.  Maybe when the Sears technician comes on Tuesday he (or she) will be able to work some magic and get things back to normal – but for now,  we are left staring at refrigerator that’s no good for anything except as a Warming Bin.

What’s a bit embarrassing to admit is that we’re pretty sure the freezer drawer got left open back on Tuesday night (the last time we really cooked a full blown meal)  and we only noticed the problem yesterday afternoon . . .   which tells you something about the state of our lives right now and how little time we have had for home-cooked Pheasant Under Glass.   Kathy is busy as stage manager for the newest play at the Racine Theater Guild (which opens this Friday)  and I am up to my eyeballs with the first full week of classes at Carthage. . .   and lately our refrigerator has been something we brush past on our way out the door.   And who knows-  maybe it was feeling neglected and this was its way of lashing out at us.   Well, it worked!

It fell upon me to do most of the emptying of the refrigerator-  which meant not only removing everything from the shelves and drawers,  but then cleaning out every glass and plastic jar that could be recycled.  It’s the Green thing to do, of course,  although Green in this case best describes the color of my skin as I tried to keep from adding to the mess, if you know what I mean.   There’s nothing quite so repulsive as scraping old black bean dip out of a jar and pouring it down the disposal . . . .  especially because black bean dip wouldn’t win any beauty contests even when newly opened and its prime.  Old and forgotten and fuzzy,  it looks like something about 12 hours away from starring in  its own Science Fiction horror movie.    But I got it done, and by the time I had finished I had earned myself enough brownie points to warrant several new opera videos and a long, hot bath.   And actually,  that cleaning-out-process is a nice chance to look at all the food that we forget about and waste – which is a shame –  and can also be a sort of Reset,  as though resetting a computer that has frozen up (although in this case Freezing Up is hardly the problem.)  And although Kathy and I end up eating out so much when we are as busy as we are right now,  there is something about having a dead-as-a-doornail refrigerator in our midst that makes us want to cook a meal.    And by golly,  when this thing is fixed we will do just that- – – even if we’re talking about nothing fancier than opening a bag of salad.    When one’s refrigerator is on the blink,  a simple bag of salad looks like a Martha Stewart film festival.