My Pandemic Love Affair
This past year I fell in love with our freezer. For real. Spent my entire life afraid of the thing, afraid of what lay in the depths of its frozen tundra. How you can’t really tell what anything is. Contents always a bit of a mystery — why something goes in, how long it remains, when to eat or toss.
We used to call them ice boxes, before consumer choice and planned obsolescence. All exactly the same. A door. Some shelving. A small compartment at the top to store chocolate chip until it burned and where trays of ice waited for my Dad’s daily martini.
“Who put the tray back in without re-filling it?” my dad would bark. “It doesn’t count to take all but that last cube or two.” He’d shout, incensed. Just one of the pet peeves we danced around. Bare feet on hot coals.
“Not me,” the Mooney boy chorus.
Freezers first just those little boxes at the top of the fridge where frost swallows contents like some alien creature. A roast waiting for the next holiday. Peas we’d learn to use as ice bags on sprained ankles. Freezers now entire doors the size the trunks we packed with sheets and towels for summer camp. What the hell does anyone store in these things? Well, in this year of surprises, that’s what I’m here to tell you—the acquired knowledge of what goes in, and what comes out. Like learning a new language, my very own kind of Tetris puzzle. Marie Kondo would be proud. “Hold that leg of lamb up, and if it doesn’t bring you joy. Toss it!” She’d surely say. And here I thought people paid attention to expiration dates.
“Those don’t mean a thing,” Mary always said. “Just there to get you to buy more.” She depending more on the smell test than any printed date.
“These must be a year old,” I say holding up a pack of tortillas. “I think I bought them on the first Sunday of the pandemic.” I add, thinking them a staple we’d depend on, a bit like beans and toilet paper.
For the last year and a half, I shop towards the end of the day Sunday, before we sit down for eggs, cheese omelets to be exact; a part of the pandemic routine that’s become unshakable. On those first Sundays before we learn how COVID’s transmitted, I shop the aisles aware of everyone’s new favorite distance, six feet, two meters, my wingspan, all of us a bit unsure of this new ground rule. Hidden expressions. Muddled conversations. I’m comforted that Shaws has exceptionally tall ceilings. One huge cavernous space that reminds me of where they stored the arc at the end of Raiders. I feel safe just as long as everyone keeps moving.
Things are different now. It’s been fourteen months and I can recite, eyes closed, everything that in the deep freeze. No, we don’t have another in basement. Mary’s family used to, to store that one big piece of meat, and soup stock, lots and lots of stock. When we met, I remember being impressed by all of this food, Mary’s Mom a fan of packing the fridge like you do your sock drawer, strays seen sticking out of the top drawer. I’m surprised the door ever shut.
Today, I can see in my mind’s eye every item Mary and I have stored — a few varieties of protein, frozen veggies, pound and pounds of coffee from our now closed favorite coffee shop, 4 A’s. Our vain attempt to postpone the inevitable end of an era with a stash of frozen coffee beans.
“They remain fresh for four of five months,” I remember Alan telling us before he and his wife closed their shop for good. “Just tape over the air vent to keep the moisture in.”
We’ve got newer tortillas, some pasta, and colossal shrimp. Yes, colossal. Named such because they might reanimate to terrorize everything else in the box. And a bird. Not a turkey, but an actual bird. A sparrow. And not the first bird to be stored in with the various chicken parts.
“Why is there a house sparrow in there?” I ask.
“It’s a perfect specimen,” Mary, the wannabe pre-med student says. “But don’t quote me on any of this. They’ll come for us.”
“I don’t think the bird police are reading Medium,” I say, which might be completely wrong. (Disclaimer. We don’t make a habit of storing dead birds in the freezer, though we once had a guillemot.)
“How did we end up with a guillemot?” I ask, ready not to be surprised by whatever the answer.
“I grabbed it from Dad and Gramarion’s freezer when we cleaned out their house,” she explains.
Mary’s spirits soar this week, on the wings of having just completed her annual Bird-a-thon. Twenty-four hours of racing around the Boston area spotting the migrating birds that fall-out of the sky on their way to breeding grounds.
“It’s dripping with birds,” birders all say. This year more than any. “We had a big day by 9:30 AM,” she texted. A Big Day when you spot a hundred species in a twenty-four-hour period. A whole host of tickers spotted too, the yet unseen bird new to your life list.
“I remember when a naturalist put a dead chickadee in my hand,” Mary explained. “It was so light. I want to do that again with the kids one day.”
The mysteries of today’s freezer laid bare, Ben & Jerry’s no longer lasting long enough to burn, shrimp so large we get excited at the thought of them creating havoc, birds well past their expiration date.
What’s not to love?
