This fall, I decided it was time to really dig in and help my mother-in-law with a job that she’d been dreading. She’s in her late seventies now, so some of the tasks around the house are a little difficult to manage. She’s been anxious for months about her deep freeze, and after putting it off for at least a year, I decided it was time to step in and see what I could do to help.
I should clarify that my mother-in-law is a worrier and sometimes the anxiety she feels translates into actions intended to give herself peace of mind. And that is probably how it happened that she ended up with not one, but three freezers in her garage. Her husband and sons loved to hunt and so it made sense to store the harvest of elk, venison, and fowl that they brought home each fall. These were a hedge against difficult times. If all else failed, there was venison in the freezer, and if the freezer failed, well, there was always another freezer.
Thus, “defrosting the freezer” was not really an afternoon’s job, and that’s probably why I put it off for so long. The other reason I put it off was this:
Somewhere, sometime in the past 10-15 years (no one is sure just how long ago it was) one of the boys shot a wild turkey. It was an exquisite bird, so intending to turn it into a trophy, this son or grandson asked Grandma if the turkey (I will refer to this bird as Harvey for future reference) could be stored in her deep freeze until a good taxidermist could be located. Grandma, being the accommodating person she is, said, “Of course.”
By the time I discovered Harvey, he was encased in a block of ice about 8 inches thick.
This is not a photo that does Harvey justice, but that’s because I couldn’t properly frame the image because my hands were not functioning well. I had just spent an hour in the 20-degree garage hacking him loose with a hatchet. I purposely left some hairy-looking feathers stuck to the blade before I put the hatchet away just because I thought that would give the next person who picks up a hatchet at Grandma’s house a little thrill…
As you can see, by the time I encountered Harvey, he was no longer a trophy specimen.
Passing Judgment on Someone Else’s Freezer
Who lives like this? Who lets this kind of thing live in her freezer day in and day out with no complaint? It takes a woman with a significant amount of patience. With five hunters in her household, she had plenty of opportunities to develop patience. Once I had freed Harvey and sent him to the great solid waste receptacle in the sky, it was time to tackle freezer number 2. This one was small because the freezer consisted only of half of a side-by-side refrigerator/freezer that had been retired to the garage after a kitchen remodel sometime in the 1980s.
This freezer was much less daunting because its main purpose is to keep bottled water and cans of Pepsi cold in case one of the grandkids shows up to mow the lawn or one of the sons comes by on a hot afternoon after work. Other than a twenty-pound bag of badly freezer-burned broccoli, the freezer half of this appliance only held the remains of a two-week supply of prepared, pre-portioned diet food Grandma received from a mail-order company. She microwaved the first portion of scrambled eggs and tofu and that was the end of that diet. The rest of her 2-week supply sat in the side-by-side until I chucked it eight years later.
The Deep, Deep Freeze
That left the biggest project, the CHEST DEEP FREEZE for last. This one took 3 separate Wednesday morning trips to fill up Grandma’s trash can with frozen meat before the garbage truck came. I had to tackle this freezer by layers.
Layer 1 included a slaughtered hog one of the sons purchased from the local High School FFA club in 2009 as part of a booster club fundraiser. Only Grandma’s Deep Freeze had space, so she said “Of Course” when the FFA came knocking with the unexpected delivery a few weeks later.
Layer 2 included two more full turkeys–with feathers and talons–in black plastic garbage bags, plus all of the cookie dough and churros Grandma bought from one of the grandkids during some dance or drill team fundraiser. That layer probably dated to sometime before 2009 since it was underneath the pig.
But in the deep, dark recesses of the deep freeze, I found the real fossils. It was like a geological journey through the crustaceous layers of the Allred hunting expeditions of the past…elk from 1997, the year before Grandpa died. Venison from 1994 and then 1991, more elk from 1984, (the year I graduated from High School), and a “neck roast” (whatever that is), round roast, and steaks dating back to 1981, (the year my 53-year-old husband graduated from high school).
One Woman’s Trash…
Helping Grandma “de-junk” has been an interesting journey, and an invasion of her privacy that I would probably not tolerate if I were in her shoes. Who am I to judge how many pairs of worn-out shoes she should be allowed to keep in her closet? What business is it of mine how many Ziploc bags of junk mail she has stashed in the back bedroom until she has time to go through them more carefully? Am I justified in insisting that her husband’s old broken-handled briefcase is too worn out even to send to goodwill?
What is it that possesses us to hang onto useless things purely out of sentiment? What about the fear that as soon as we discard something we will need it again? How will I answer to my own son when he is helping me clean my basement two decades from now and realizes I still have the Halloween costume I made him when he was 2 years old? Will he be mystified about why I saved all of the method books from his piano lessons? Will his 4th-grade fossil collection be less valuable to him when he finds it again thirty years after he closed the box for the last time? Is it unreasonable that I hang on to that life-size nutcracker that is missing its right arm?
I will continue to muse about this for a while. In the meantime, my refrigerator stopped running this week. I kind of wish I had an extra freezer somewhere in the garage. It would sure come in handy right now.
