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Living alone has its challenges — no one to film the foibles

Wed, 10/17/2018 - 12:00 am

Just Passing Through

When one lives alone, he or she must be ready to take care of anything that arises. Many of us face this situation. We have to keep up with appointments, pay bills, make sure the oil is changed in the car and fix little things that break.

However, those of us who find ourselves with life’s responsibilities are sometimes a little perplexed with how to get it all done. I, like my late husband, find myself putting it off. That works for a while but sometimes reality strikes. That’s what happened this week.

My refrigerator is not very old. Maybe five — or fifteen years old. It’s a nice refrigerator and has required no maintenance — so far. A few weeks ago, I left the freezer drawer (on the bottom) open and the resulting “growth” of frost could have been used for a movie set. It required a major scraping, melting, and throwing-away. Actually, it was a good experience. I didn’t really need that four pound bag of chicken thighs which I got on sale six years ago — right before the big salmonella recall. Everything worked fine, until I ran out of ice.

Sunday, I realized the six cubes that rested in the bottom of the “catcher” were shriveled. I thought maybe I’d turned the icemaker off during the “big chill” cleanup.

Now, I must explain that ice maker is in the back of the bottom of the refrigerator. To reach the control wire, I had to pull the drawer out, bend at the waist, and wedge my upper body, over the Marie Callender frozen dinners and past the pecans and peaches to get to the wire. Which, by the way, was not the problem.

I could have called a repair man. That would have cost me at least fifty dollars, but I could fix this myself. I suspected it was ice residue either in the water line or in the ice maker causing it to “freeze-up.” Wasn’t I intuitive? I got out my hair dryer, an extension cord, and wedged back into the drawer. After a minute or so, I decided to try to see if ice was melting inside the mechanism. I pushed my index finger into one of the little slots from which ice pops during “good times.” There was water inside and a small piece of ice stuck to the little pusher (technical terms avoid me). I tapped it and then tried to extract my finger.

My finger was stuck — wedged by my arthritic first knuckle. My legs were getting tired. My head, down by the frozen peas, was getting frostbite. I was dizzy. I wondered how upset my daughters would be they didn’t get the whole thing on film. What would the EMT’s do when they got there — if they got there before the dead chicken smelled better than my dead body? Would they have to cut my finger off with the Jaws of Life? Should I have got