Zen and the art of refrigerator maintenance

For years, I’ve tried to pass along the joy that comes with spit-shining plexiglas.

I’ve gushed over the rewards of scraping up caked-on catsup. I’ve heralded the power that comes with throwing out expired milk. I’ve presented with fanfare the jelly jars I organized by color along the freshly scrubbed refrigerator door. Nothing.

Like folding cuffed sheets and polishing bathroom faucets, refrigerator cleaning is a lost household art, relegated to the obsessed, the germaphobic and let’s face it, the middle-aged mother raised on Mr. Clean.

Actually, since I was tall enough to reach the freezer gasket, and my mother pronounced me best at cleaning the refrigerator (probably because she didn’t want to do it), I have held sole responsibility for making sure my family doesn’t die of moldy ginger, or in the ’60s, more likely, pimento cheese.

Truth be told, it was a hated job then. It’s hated now, requiring deep-knee bends and the wit and intelligence to take apart an entire appliance, with pieces so big they have to be cleaned in a bathtub, then put back together in the right order.

Nobody dusts anymore, either. And yet, unlike other archaic household tasks, refrigerator cleaning is necessary for survival. Unfolded cuffed sheets can only make you OCD. Moldy ginger can make you sick.

This is a point of fact I have often presented to the varying children who’ve lived with me off and on for decades, including this past year of COVID-19. Only, these are millennials now who eat six-day-old blocks of cheese on camping trips.

I admonish and try to assign guilt. “At least if you spill it, wipe it up.”

“I didn’t spill it,” says one. “I didn’t spill it,” says the other. “I don’t drink mango juice.’

Sometimes I try to let it go.

It’s just food.

But then I find I can’t open the vegetable bin because it’s glued to the floor of the refrigerator with peach yogurt and an egg yolk, which will take me 15 minutes of warm compresses and steel wool to get up.

A few months ago, I decided a new fridge was the answer.

Two of the shelves of the old fridge were patched with duct tape. I always hated that too-tiny, freezer-on-top fridge anyway. And when the ice maker stopped, hallelujah, time for a new French door model that surely would inspire.

As I flung open those double doors

that first time, the ambient light shining down on me from 25-watt bulbs on high, I could almost hear opera.

That was when the fridge was empty. Didn’t take long for it to fill with the same old rotten tomatoes.

Of late, I’ve decided the answer lies, like everything else these days, in mindfulness practices.

I can do Warrior One while reaching all the way to the back of the fridge for that catsup spill.

I can practice deep belly breathing as I clean — except when opening the cheese drawer.

I can most especially engage the practice of loving kindness as I see the drips of red, red wine that somebody managed to spill all the way down the back wall of all three levels of this cavernous monstrosity.

I can also try to be like my uncommon friend Abby who actually waxes poetic while cleaning other people’s refrigerators as a favor.

It’s rewarding, she says, “wiping jelly smears off the jelly jar, washing a glass shelf till it squeaks and pitching all those last-drop condiment bottles.”

Her refrigerators apparently sing, too. “With a dramatic sweep of my hand, I plunge the door open, and the angels all sing in harmony with sparkly clean shelves and gleaming jars.”

Somebody has to be the exception to the rule. Meanwhile, next up: chakra alignment while ironing embroidered handkerchiefs.