My daughter, grandson and I happily arrived back to the farm this evening from our journey south for the holidays. Unfortunately all was not well. I decided to go to the basement and check the freezer to find something for dinner only to find that the items on the very top had defrosted and the ice (this is not a frost free type freezer) was melting. Oh No! I am in for another melt down. What is it with my family and freezers? We checked the outlet—it was working so that wasn’t the problem. We thought maybe there had been a power outage while we were away, but checking the stuff in the refrigerator’s freezer, we found it had not thawed out. There was bad news: The freezer was kaput, and good news: most of the food had not yet thawed out. Another day away and we would have had a scene from CSI down there. My daughter and I quickly set about digging out all the food (mostly frozen meat of various types) and putting it in boxes, coolers, laundry baskets and whatever we could lay our hands on. I did suggest that anything that we couldn’t immediately identify be trashed and luckily she agreed so we were able to get rid of some of the “mystery meat” in there. I grabbed two large, black trash bags and tossed the "unknown meat" into them. Wow! A chest type freezer can hold a lot of meat! In digging out the meat I did notice that she had an inordinate amount of sausage. I asked why she had so much sausage and the reply was that it came with the meat from the pig that had been butchered. No one in the family likes sausage so it sits in the freezer. I think I will find someone who wants it and get rid of it! We needed to save our bacon (but not the sausage)!
We then started calling friends and relatives to inquire whether they had any extra room in their freezers that we might use. However, in farm country, in winter, most people have their freezers full. While it was cold enough (read: freezing) outside to store the meat for the night we were afraid that animals (particularly the wild dogs) would get into it. I wasn’t relishing the idea of picking up dead meat out of the yard the next day when my daughter remembered that there was an old freezer out in the shed. She went out to see if it was working and she came back with good news! It appeared to be working! So we dragged the boxes and laundry baskets of meat up from the basement, through the house and loaded up the car to haul it out to the shed. Of course there is no light in the shed so we had to use the car’s headlights to see what we were doing. Long about now I started looking over my shoulder for Jeff Foxworthy as his tag line "You might be redneck if......." was running through my mind. We grabbed frozen hunks of meat and literally tossed them into the freezer (I am not looking forward to going out there to get dinner in the future!) The stuff is all in there but in no particular order or any resemblance of neatness. Just a bunch of frozen hunks of meat, some in plain old zip lock bags. I wonder if Jeffrey Dahmer's freezer looked somewhat like this.
In the meantime my 3 year old grandson was standing on the front steps yelling out to us wondering what we were doing. I yelled back for him to go into the house as he was barefoot and did not have a coat on and did I mention snow on the ground. We yelled back and forth for awhile (again looking for Jeff Foxworthy) and he finally did go inside. Unfortunately, when we came back to the house we found that he had locked all the doors and we couldn’t get in. My daughter and I ran from door to door trying the handles and calling for the 3 year old to open the doors. He seemed more interested in watching Sponge Bob and didn’t want to let us in. Guess he was mad that we didn’t let him come out and play with the frozen food. This was a problem. People who live in the country don’t lock their doors. In fact my daughter doesn’t even have a key to her house. They bought it at foreclosure and never did get keys to it. (oh dear, I KNOW that Jeff Foxworthy is here somewhere) I then remembered that the basement door was probably open but I had tossed some firewood down the outside steps earlier so I could drag it into the house (Oh, God, I AM a redneck now) and it was sitting in a pile at the bottom of the steps covered with a tarp. I decided to try climbing down the stairs and over the wood which was something like skiing down the side of a very bumpy hill and slamming into the door at the bottom. Luckily that door was unlocked and I gained access to the house.
By this time it was about 8:30 and any thought of cooking dinner had "melted" from my mind. I recalled that there were two (now no longer frozen) pizzas that had been at the top of the freezer and threw them in the oven.
I wish I could say “it is good to be home”. Hah! We ate the pizza and collapsed into bed tired from both the long trip home and effort of dealing with the freezer problem.
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