A tale of two refrigerators

We got a new refrigerator yesterday. Actually, it's a new-to-us refrigerator. It came from the house one of B's clients just sold - long story. It's almost brand-new, just a year or two old, and it's much bigger than our old one. It's a side-by-side, with a water and ice dispenser in the door, which the kids think is way cool. I predict their water consumption is about to go up exponentially. And as soon as Campbell figures out how to push a chair over and get the water to come out, I predict I'll be cleaning a lot of puddles.

Our old refrigerator has been relegated to the garage, and B says he's turning it into a "kegerator" for his beer. I asked if he had suddenly reverted to college age.


I'm a bit sad to see it go, though. It was my very first brand-new refrigerator. Throughout college and grad school I lived in apartments and had to deal with whatever came with the living quarters, and they weren't always terrible.

The first house B and I rented together didn't have a refrigerator in the kitchen, but the owners told us there was one out in the back shed we could use. We dragged it in the house and cleaned out the rodent nests, and I spent two hours cleaning it with bleach and tooth brush to make it even close to usable. It was so old that the freezer was inside the refrigerator, and it needed to be defrosted at least once a month or we'd lose our frozen stuff inside a glacier.

We bought our first house right after we got married, and it came with an old refrigerator. It was in such bad shape that the bottom shelf was held up by the crisper drawers. Every time we opened on of the drawers, we ran the risk of the shelf's capsizing and dumping everything on the floor.

Then, 4th of July weekend of that year, we got a flyer about a big appliance sale at Home Depot and decided to take the leap and buy our very own refrigerator. It wasn't fancy, and it wasn't very expensive, but it had an ice maker and it was so clean and white. For the first few weeks, I hugged the new refrigerator every time I went in the kitchen.

But now, almost 11 years later, it sits in the garage, lonely and forlorn, destined to hold spare gallons of milk and cases of beer. I almost want to go out and hug it and promise that we won't forget about it.

Hmmm. Perhaps Ella comes by her obsession with not throwing away toys honestly.

Even though the new refrigerator is so much bigger and hold so much easier to store things in - it holds four gallons of milk with room to spare - I'm just not as excited about it as I was the other one. I feel no need to go hug it, even if it does have a water and ice dispenser on the front.