Beltane and the Moon of Sorrow
Saturday gratefuls: Our Kenmore 19 Frostless Freezer. Its good years of service. A good temporary solution to its imminent demise. Crowhill Appliance. Dave, the tech. Seoah’s help. Kate’s smile when Rigel lay down on her quilt. The gift of pleasant days. Pine pollen. Fish. Curtis Spitler Ellis. Gertrude Eliza Ellis. Judy. Raeone. Saturdays.
Symptoms of a pandemic. Remember all those folks buying toilet paper? Even though Covid doesn’t have g-i effects? Or, the whole PPE scandal with no masks for medical personnel? Out of stock items on Amazon like hand sanitizer, toilet paper? Discovered another one yesterday.
On Wednesday Seoah told me about an alarm going off in the garage. I spent my usual minutes of frustration trying to find it. Not the cars. What else could it be? Oh. The freezer. Temperature alert. Red light flashing. Uh-oh. Remember those meat bundles I bought from Tony’s? Yep. In danger.
I looked at it. Opened the door. No frost buildup. The meat might have just started to defrost. I pushed the quick freeze button, shut the door, and the alarm went off. OK. On Thursday it was beeping again.
We bought this freezer near the time we moved to Andover. That was 1994. It’s been a good mechanical servant for all those days. I even hit it with the car once and it kept on ticking. Had an incident last year when it frosted up. I removed everything, left it open for a day, and the frost melted. I loaded it back up and it continued to work. Until Wednesday.
Time for a new freezer, it seemed. I started looking first at Consumer Reports. OK. GE makes good freezers. I hunted for them online. Looked at Best Buy. Ah. They have it. $900. Reasonable. Wait. That button changed from yellow to gray. Oh, out of stock. Well, understandable. It’s a good one.
I checked Lowes. It was out of stock there, too. Appliance Factory. Out of stock. Specialty Appliances. Home Depot. All out of stock. Ok. I looked for one of the others Consumer Report recommended. Out of stock, too. Decided to check for any old freezer. Out of stock. Kate suggested I look for a chest freezer. Out of stock.
There is nowhere in Colorado that you can buy either an upright or chest freezer. I suspect that’s true everywhere. According to a salesman I talked to, only two manufactures of freezers remain, Amana and Frigidaire. They make all the other brands. Not sure what that means for all the Consumer Reports subtle gradations. Anyhow, they’ve told all their customers there will be no stock again until early to mid-fall.
That put me in a funk yesterday. I like to solve problems and when I have a problem that seems unsolvable. Not good. Hundreds of dollars of top quality meat in a dying freezer. Damn.
Went to bed for a nap. See if some sleep might refresh the circuits. While waiting to go to sleep, I remembered the freezer in our refrigerator. It’s a pull-out bottom freezer and has a fair amount of space. I imagined the packages of meat I’d bought from Tony’s. Huh. They should fit.
My funk lifted. Today Seoah and I will switch the lower value foods stored in the refrigerator with the meats in the dying Kenmore. When I asked Dave, the tech from Crowhill, how long he thought the freezer would last, he said, “A day. A month. Several months.” And shrugged.
They don’t do compressor repairs anymore. That’s because at $900 to $1,000 they’re more costly than a new unit. If, of course, you can find one. I thought briefly about going ahead, but then realized I’d have a brand new compressor in a freezer over twenty years old. Other stuff in it is old, too.
We’ll continue using the Kenmore until the compressor ceases to function. If we lose some popsicles, frozen veggies, or tater tots (yes, sue me. I like’m.), that’ll be ok. It was the thought of losing all that meat and not being able to do anything about it…
And, when Amana and Frigidaire crank back up, we’ll get ourselves a new freezer. Sometime this fall.
