fridgets

All my life, I’ve heard other people say “But it will make it harder to clean.” The argument never swayed me. If someone was worth having or doing, the fact that it made things harder to clean was unfortunate, but not important. Privately, I thought that people who focused on how hard things were to clean were killjoys, unable to focus on the more important things in life.

Like many women in my generation, my house has never been as clean as my mother’s. Part of this has been because I’ve been busy doing all sorts of things other than cleaning and part of it has been because I’ve been waiting to see how many years certain areas can go before my husband or a child spontaneously decides to clean them.

Let’s take the outside of the fridge. Over the decades, we’ve added hundreds of fridge magnets to the front and side of the refrigerator. Some of them have clips to hold business cards, informational mailings, photographs, invitations, menus from local restaurants, artwork, and all of the other things that people hang on their fridges.

I clean the handle areas and the water dispenser periodically, but it had been at least 15 years since I’d removed all the magnets and done a thorough clean.

The water dispenser and handle area are themselves annoying to clean. They are prone to stain and require multiple passes with different cleaning implements and cleaning powders and solutions to get them really clean. It’s hard to get in all the cracks and crannies. It’s not a job I enjoy.

The front wasn’t so hard to clean, especially after I removed all the fridge magnets I don’t need and don’t love. I destroyed the crossword made of fridge alphabet blocks so I could clean under it, and carefully cleaned around the fridge pattern blocks (they weren’t themselves dirty and are a pain to remove).

The side of the fridge, though, was another story. It was covered with several sets of magnetic poetry words. I think that people have made messages with them a time or two, but they have been inert for the past 15 years, getting dirtier and dirtier.

I tried to clean around and over them, but it didn’t work, so I took a deep breath and decided to remove them.

This is a tricky business (and is probably partially why no one changes them). You have to scrape each individual word off the fridge with your fingernail and retrieve the ones that fall off and under the fridge. Some of them were glued to the fridge with gunk and required extra effort. Some of them were separating from the magnet backing. One by one, I took them off and plunked them in a bag. It was an unpleasant process that consumed well over an hour.

I’ve never been that wild about the fridge poetry, which seems neither conducive to creating spontaneous poetry (because your word choice is so limited), nor useful for any other creative purpose. Yet the poetry words have moldered there on the fridge undisturbed.

The outside of the fridge is clean now, and free of hundreds of annoying tiny magnets. The information still on the fridge is organized and relevant.

No one noticed, and probably no one thought that cleaning the outside of the fridge was a job worth the time it took to do it. This is the classic situation with housework. It’s not valued work, whether a person womans up and does it herself or whether someone else does it on their behalf.

The dirt doesn’t care. It just stacks up and gets grodier and grodier until someone actually cleans.

Turns out that things that are hard to clean are a killjoy, and, surprise surprise, they are lying in wait for me personally.