Frigidaire

My brother is disappointed because I’m not being a very friendly moth. “Write something!” he said. “Write something I want to read!”

“Like what?” But he didn’t have very good answers. Luckily, I figured it out: I can write about refrigerators.

Publicity photo for Stars Over Broadway with Jane Froman, James Melton (left), and Pat O’Brien, 1935

We had one. Then on Tuesday, its freezer stopped working. Our homegrown self-slaughtered chickens thawed. The fifteen pounds of berries I’d picked leaked out with the ice into a bloody puddle on the floor. My chocolate pudding ice cream turned into plain old chocolate pudding. Sometimes its easy to forget the fragile balance of life with machines. Sometimes life reminds you.

There we were at midnight, self-diagnosing our refrigerator on Nate’s telephone internet, hauling the fridge out to look at its backside with Nate’s internet telephone turned flashlight. Our diagnosis: call a pro.

Then came a period of what my mom calls “the life of a housewife.” I was personally involved in 23 phone calls and 13 texts on the subject of refrigerators, and that doesn’t include Nate’s calls to the landlord, the landlord’s calls to the repair guys, the repair guys calls to each other, Nate’s calls to appliance stores, or his call to our friend with a truck after the compressor was declared defunct and Nate took it upon himself to get a new fridge that night at Lowes. “Nate’s a doer,” said our landlord, during nearly the last phone call. “He’s a shaker and a – a – I can’t even think of the word.” Which is about right.

Now we have a new fridge! The chickens survived by being little chicken refugees in our neighbor’s freezer. The berry juice mostly came off the floor. I ate my ice cream. My brother has something to read. Something thrilling, right Buddy?

And if you would like to send us a photo of yourself, we’d put it, like my Aunt Buck would say, on our Frigidaire.

The Facts of Life. And Chickens.

We got chickens this spring, and I built them a coop out of wood scavenged from construction sites, and star-headed screws that really do work better than the phillips head ones, just like the guy at the lumber store said. They worked so well, I was like, “Becca, you’re really good at screwing.” But I guess it really depends on the screw.

Oh, that was bad.

Anyways, the thing is, chickens sort of make me think of sex. Not because I think they are sexy. Don’t worry. It’s some childhood association, formed by asking about where chicken eggs came from right around when I started thinking about babies getting made, or maybe from looking at old men’s crotches at hot springs and then looking at turkey gobbles. I don’t know.

But when I was finishing the chicken run, which is a nice word for chicken cage, I got thinking about how anything we do to thwart nature is almost always really ugly, or has some nasty side effect. Like to keep raccoons from eating chickens, we put those happy, strutting birds in mucky cages. Or to keep makin’ babies from making babies, we ingest enough estrogen to emasculate frogs and stick plastic crosses up our uteruses.

See how short a time it takes to get from chicken to sex? That’s all I have to say about that.