The Gold-Colored Refrigerator

In 1978, my husband and I bought our first home with a $2000 down payment inherited from my grandma. One of the most elegant inclusions in the sale was a gold-colored side-by-side refrigerator from Montgomery Wards store. I don’t know how long the refrigerator had already stood in that house, but I was thrilled to have it passed to me. Opening the doors to it always felt dramatic as we served dinners for birthdays and holidays and gatherings of students and our children, breakfasts and lunches and snacks.

Many years later, our beloved black German Shepherd, who was waiting for his leash to go to the park, scared a substitute postal lady who was crossing over our lawn. She tripped as she stumbled backward. He didn’t touch her, but she took his growled warning as an affront. We were forced to move, murder him, or never receive mail again. We moved. And in our van we included our precious gold-colored side-by-side refrigerator. It was installed in the tiny kitchen of a mountain home where it served social and domestic functions for another nine years.

In the meantime, we developed a deep affection for two horses that we bought with sweat equity, shoveling manure for 56 horses on a nearby ranch. We loved our horses like we loved our dogs as extensions of our family, and when my husband retired from his job, we moved to a small ranch in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains to enable us to care for them without interference.

The following years took us through many ups and not-so-ups. Our horses died. We relinquished an adopted mammoth donkey who adored my horse and blamed my husband for not saving her from whatever finally finished her life. We buried something like eight dogs and a cat on our property (our daughter’s family contributed their expired pets) in addition to our horses. Mother Nature whisked away the monuments we made for them, letting them become an anonymous contribution to the wildness around us. And the gold-colored refrigerator, now relegated to a post as a back-up appliance tucked quietly in the basement, kept whirring away, keeping pots of soup or chili too large for the upstairs fridge and back-up portions of frozen fish and bread, cheeses and fruits.

Yesterday, the gold-colored refrigerator mostly died. There was a time when we could’ve called a repair person, when the mechanics weren’t electronic or incomprehensible. But no one in our town fixes ancient refrigerators any longer. Ice cream meant for a near-future peach pie dripped. No longer frozen shrimp threatened to smell. Our summer watermelon squatted gloomily on damp shelving. My husband filled garbage bags with the soggy victims of too much heat.

People boast of family members who live past being 100 or 110 or farther yet. We’re told the feat isn’t extraordinary any longer, but it looks extraordinary to us as we rise into our 80s. How many refrigerators live nearly 50 years? We bought a replacement refrigerator today, to be delivered in a few days, but it won’t be the same. It won’t have the same dignity or grandeur. It won’t have side-by-side doors to sweep open. Lives leave markers of the times that have passed, photos or mementoes, scars and awards. Our society rushes to replace items that feel obsolete in our dashing technology. But our gold-colored refrigerator worked. Here, there, and in all the places we’ve lived, that machine kept working as newer models came and went upstairs. The truth is, we must admit when age has defeated our usefulness. Those who limp past their fitness, stumbling through jobs they can no longer do well, are living a lie. They need to find other occupations for their minds and hands. Refrigerators face destruction.

Farewell gold-colored refrigerator. You have been a far more dedicated, selfless worker than our other appliances. We’ll remember you and tell your tale, hoping we can be as dignified when we’re called to move on.