It’s a freezing time of year, so freezers seem like an appropriate topic. I consider myself something of an expert on the subject. I became an expert when two people asked my opinion, my unoffered opinion, within the same summer. People so seldom ask for my advice, I hardly know how to look humble. One of the two people was a close friend, like a sister to me, and the other one was my actual sister. “Which is better,” they both wanted to know, “a chest freezer or an upright?” Putting on my most expert and professorial face, I gave them both the exact same answer.
Of the two, an upright freezer is far easier to keep organized; you don’t have to dig through layer upon layer of frozen tundra to find your last package of ravioli and, at a glance, you can easily see what you have on the shelves. Every time you open the door, however, the frozen air literally falls out onto the ground, so a chest freezer is more efficient and will keep a deeper, more even freeze. A chest also holds more cargo because it’s basically a huge, open pit-of-freeze. Most importantly, when children come looking for popsicles, they are far less likely to leave a chest lid open than they are the door of an upright.
My advice must have been either convincing or confusing because my friend bought an upright freezer, and my sister bought a chest.
Of course, I gave them both the wrong answer. Experience has taught me that everyone actually needs four freezers, in any shape you can get them in. It’s simple math. You need one freezer to keep your beef in. You need another freezer to keep other people’s beef in – and you can consider yourself lucky if you’re only hosting one extra beef at a time. It goes without saying that you need a transition freezer too. This is the freezer you put all of last year’s beef and pork and whatever in, so the old meat doesn’t get mixed in with the new. You also need a freezer for corn, pumpkin, fruit leather pulp, the tomatoes you didn’t have time to process and the berries you eventually mean to turn into jams, jellies and pie filling. You should also have a freezer for bags of fundraising french fries, Tater Tots and pizzas. When chicken hits record lows, or ice cream is buy-one-get-one-free, those occasions also justify their own appliance. According to my calculations, then, I’m currently short two freezers.
I could actually use another one for emergencies. Lurking behind the gentle hum of every freezer is the impending nightmare of the freezer-left-open, or even worse, the freezer-gone-bad. In order of things I dread on this farm, I rank the freezer-gone-bad third. Of course, first place goes to flooding the basement with irrigation water. Second place is having the cows get out.
Since I have tried but never succeeded in burning the house down, cleaning out a melted freezer easily remains in third place. I’ve had a lot of experience with it. I’ve carted tons upon tons of food from freezer to freezer, hoping to save it. I’ve thrown away food in such disturbingly melted, oozing and rotted states, I’ll never fully recover. I’ve fed my dogs cuts of thawed prime meat that they have no right to ever have seen. And yet I cannot divorce my freezers. Just know, if we ever have a weeklong power outage, the Colemans will be hosting the greatest barbecue ever visible from outer space.
Every month, I receive a letter from Idaho Power telling me that I use 700% more power than any other person in the state, my neighbors are embarrassed to be living next to me, and 90% of my energy consumption goes toward appliances. I’ll have you know that they do not actually know how I spend my energy, but they’re not wrong either. A word about the Idaho Power letter of shame. My 84-year-old mother keeps getting the letters too. I estimate that she uses about the same amount of energy it takes to keep a gnat airborne. Still, she keeps trying to use less. She’s cranked down the heat in every unused room; she turns off all her lights; she limits her wild parties. She doesn’t even have a freezer hoarding problem. And yet the letters keep coming.
“Mom,” I told her, “you’re going to use more energy because you have a well. You have to pump all your domestic water and the water that irrigates your whole place too. You’re being compared to people that live on postage stamps and have city water.”
She still couldn’t rest. Finally, she called Idaho Power and took them to task. “I cannot use any less power than I’m using now, so please quit sending me your letters,” she said. “I have a well!” Since the letters are automatically generated, her call didn’t change a thing, but I’m impressed with her panache. I myself have never told Idaho Power anything, but I know I don’t have a leg to stand on. I am guilty of appliance overkill on all accounts. I fully expect them to arrive at my house someday to pry my three dozen freezers out of the basement and to restrict my diet to freeze-dried food. It’ll probably be for the best.
.jpg?t=1687979285&width=640){kind=logo}
