Fridge

"What's on your refrigerator door?" someone asked. 

In the American "tradition"...Stop. In the American tradition, before about 1950, refrigerators did not exist. Traditionally people who lived in cold enough climates had their own ice houses, where big blocks of ice were cut off the lake on subzero days, insulated with straw, and buried. People who didn't own an ice house might buy blocks of ice from an "ice man" who hauled ice around in a wagon. People who lived in warm climates just couldn't keep things cold overnight; meat might be dried, milk made into butter or cheese, but usually they had to be used while fresh. If you wanted to drink milk every day, you kept a cow, and actually, because the very freshest milk has not been chilled, people used to prefer their milk warm. 

In the early twentieth century people began to experiment with chemical coolants and electric fans for cooling boxes of food. Most families didn't have all that much food that needed to be kept all that cold, and if they did want refrigerators it seemed reasonable to hide the things in the cellar. 

So manufacturers set to work to manufacture cozy traditions that revolved around the refrigerator right in the kitchen. Jello salads and ice pops were among these new traditions. In the mid-twentieth century British and European people laughed at Americans' adoption of the fad for serving drinks chilled with high volumes of ice, which made messy puddles of condensed water on the table, when it wasn't even dangerously hot outside. Then there was the refrigerator door as family bulletin board, festooned with terribly cute little objects attached to magnets that were supposed to hold messages, postcards, and children's handiwork on the refrigerator door. 

My elders didn't really embrace either of those traditions but they couldn't say that anything in the Bible or the Constitution specifically condemned them. My parents even bought a few sets of magnetic letters to teach us children to spell out words and short messages on them. Sometimes we went to the trouble of carrying letters into the kitchen to spell out our names, "I love you Mom," or short words that might or might not have related to what was being posted on the refrigerator door. Mother thought this was cute. Dad was more likely to scrape off a handful of magnetic letters and dump them back into the toy box. I remember looking at a clean, bare refrigerator door much more often than looking at something my brother had drawn with an explanatory note like "Horse" or "Dog" spelled out in magnetic letters. 

We were not encouraged to clutter walls with pictures or cards. It was tidier to keep them in neat little binders. Dist catchers were not my mother's idea of decoration, nor have they become mine. After about age five none of us bothered sticking things on the refrigerator door until the year I was thirteen. 

During my thirteenth winter my grandmother, the one who had being from Tennessee as an excuse for having terrible taste, left us her personal paraphernalia, including a gaudy turquoise-colored glass bead brooch and three gaudy butterflies, the size but not the colors of Painted Ladies, made of metal with beads stuck on. The brooch was worn with things like the orange pants suit, with both blazer jacket and vest. The butterflies flew across the corner of the refrigerator door. 

After Granma's funeral the three butterflies quietly migrated to our refrigerator door at home. And there they are today. Every now and then they've been moved to a side, or to the top of the refrigerator, and cleaned under. Then, back they go. They were tacky when they were new, those butterflies. They weren't new by the time I was born. Well, y'know what, neither my parents nor I have ever tried to decorate a house to impress trendy people. Granma's butterflies, like kid art, have souvenir value.

A few years ago I visited the home of some friends for the first time. I wasn't sure I wanted to be on home-visiting terms with them until I saw a silly, unrealistic metal buterfly perched on the side of a metal cabinet...made by the same hands as Granma's, no doubt. It was a favorable sign. We're still on home-visiting terms today.