As I was dancing with the refrigerator last summer, thoughts stored in muscle memory--the ghost of corner-spun refrigerators past--seemed to frame the scene like cherubs: the mustard yellow one, the avocado, the Platonic form refrigerator still in its box.

I thought of all the foods I would be able to enjoy more of: butter lettuces, pro-biotic yogurts, popsicles! I thought, with relief, of how easy and indulged my refrigerator-ful life would be, now. I thought with pride at how many years I had managed well without. With a slight hair flip of entitled self-pity, I thought of how circumstance had required more of me than others I could name could bear.

Then I remembered that I had begged for it.

If my life could be seen as a film strip, my twenties would look like a pantomime of rage at refrigerators. I said things like "I wish I would be allowed not to have a refrigerator" while glaring at one of the eyesore behemoths that clogged my studio apartments.

My wish was eventually granted and I remember such delight on the day the trailer fridge was finally declared to be "gone" even though it was physically not.

Many things had changed.

I no longer minded its body.

I was eager to be hard and enterprising, to be resourceful and to have my wiles tested. I lived comfortably without refrigeration in increasing smug ingenuity.

I understood that to chill a living vegetable or other food product was to slow its breath, its life, but not as much as one would assume. Like putting a butterfly in a box to keep it safe, sometimes an attempt to extend life only ruins it.

I found out that my early anger at the ugly boxes I co-habitated with against my will was actually a power undiscovered.

I embraced fresh eating and it upgraded every part of my life.

But then, having so mastered impromptu root-cellaring, I began to feel deprived.

Immediately, my mother found occasion to offer to me my father's beer fridge without telling him.

The look of horror on my father's face, in my imagination, was enough to confirm that I was right to decline. It felt right, at least. And somehow I was never at any time without a way to keep food cold.

Then I moved to Coos Bay and was offered a share of a refrigerator that was a good hike from my room or any kitchen. I declined.

I was glad of the opportunity to feel frustration about it and unfair deprivation.

Months later, it was pointed out that the unplugged refrigerator in the barn by my room probably still worked. After a wipe down and clearing of the path, I began the happy, nostalgic, humbled, surrendering dance of inviting this surprisingly shiny white refrigerator to be my roommate. This is where our story began.

What a marvel that it had been there all along, right around the corner, dusted into polite demuring by years of anticipation of this moment that redeemed not only its own trespass of being, but by own.

Some adolescent self had been standing in embarrassed paralysis, posing as my refrigerator.

It all made so much sense in the familiar rush of catachresis that denies communication of the understanding it delivers: so blunt, so cascading, and poignant, and obvious, and insane.

I had made a tar baby of a giant sore thumb because to accept this giant, cold,obstacle in my life, my awkward innocent adolescence, my powerlessness to help, any refrigerator's innocence, its powerlessness so early and wisely... It would have been too big a step. Only that. It had coiled, looping a gentler slope. Only that.

Woven, the living thread self-actualizes.

And now, my fridge is of a brand called Magic Chef. We have a good relationship. Some ordinary and beautiful and ancient struggle has ended. At last.