The Refrigerator's Demise

Annmarie Throckmorton, M.A.
14 hours ago
2 min read

For half a century I thought that I had killed the refrigerator.

From time to time, when I was a young adult, I would visit my parents out in the countryside to have dinner, talk, ask for money, and probably do some chores for them. I enjoyed making bread, weeding, cleaning, and creating scenery for my father's model railroad layout that filled their basement. Once I even painted the soffits and fascia* around their large, lovely house. That was a long, hot job well done!

The day that I undertook to clean out the icy frost from the freezer compartment of my parents' refrigerator I thought that I was doing them a great favor. I used an ice pick and it worked great to remove sheets of ice but I soon punctured through the freezer compartment wall into the cooling coils and some chemical hissed out. I was appalled. My helpful work had killed their large, expensive refrigerator. I dreaded telling them, but when I slunk into the living room where they were both reading they hardly looked up for my apology. I was very relieved as I had thought they would become very angry and probably start yelling at me.

It was only years later, when I was telling this little life story to a friend, that I realized that the ice pick that I found lying on the counter (and which I had never seen before) had probably been used by my mother to clean the refrigerator freezer compartment (just before I arrived home); and she too had probably punched through the freezer compartment wall, then left it to sit a while and decide what to do. I now suspect that both she and I had killed that refrigerator, and I wish they had told me so instead of keeping silent on it.

Later they ambled out to buy a new, larger, fancier refrigerator.

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* "A soffit is the horizontal underside panel beneath the roof overhang, while fascia is the vertical trim along the roof edge, together forming a protective and ventilated roof perimeter." Random Internet Source

We Killed The Refrigerator