[It’s been a while since I did a throwback. I wrote this one is about the accidental art gallery that happens in so many kitchens.]

            Show me a person with nothing on their fridge door and I’ll show you someone who just had a new refrigerator delivered. The metal exterior and wide-open space seems to lend itself to magnetizing everything and anything to the fridge door – well at least anything that a magnet can hold up. Before you can say “What’s for supper?”, someone has christened that gleaming exterior with a take-out menu and matching magnet.

            The fridge door is really a microcosm of the household, showcasing what’s important and memorable to the family that lives here. At the very least, it’s a great place to stick stuff that you’re not really sure what to do with. Nearly every home has at least one or two photographs on their icebox, a collection that usually grows into a multi-people collage just shortly after school pictures and Christmas cards come out. And of course, if you’re a parent or a grandparent, or even a neighbor to a family with children, chances are you’re going to have some wax crayon, glitter glue and egg carton creation adhered to the fridge with at least a dozen magnets or more likely with some glitter glue that seeped to the back of the project. Because the fact of the matter is children are prolific artists. Even if your three-year-old had just scribbled a two-second blue circle with a nearly dried-up marker, they will insist that you hang it on the fridge because (apparently) that blue circle is a picture of you and it goes with the series of twenty-five identical pictures of you already layered on the fridge door. (You probably never guessed you were so complex until you had children.)

            But the short people in your household aren’t the only culprits. The fridge may be the place where you stick a funny comic strip you cut out from the newspaper (usually mirroring your life is such an eerie manner you wonder how the cartoonist got into your house.) In our home, the refrigerator is close enough to the garbage where I go through the mail. Therefore, the fridge is the place that all those reminder notices from the dentist get pinned up. There are other reminders, too. I have something up that’s called “Prayer for a Tired, Irritable Parent”. Although I don’t actually read it that often, just seeing the title reminds me to be thankful for noisy, wrestling children because (apparently) that’s a sure sign that they’re healthy. Well, healthy except for reaching abnormally high sugar levels on cookie baking days. And another clipping encourages me to be thankful for things like high gas bills because it means we’re warm and for snug fitting clothes because it means we have enough to eat.

            Which most of us do. And because the Pavlovian response to any sort of anxiety, from high gas bills to wrestling children to “How am I going to get this glob of petrified glitter glue off my brand-new fridge?” is to open the fridge door. So many of us will use this spot to strategically display some sort of deterrent to doing just that. One does need to weigh the matter carefully, since fridge doors are somewhat like public property. Everyone who walks into your home is going to look at what’s on your fridge and some will even go a step further and check the contents inside. (These are good people to play the marbles-in-the-medicine-chest-trick on.)

If you choose to put up an inspiring picture of yourself at your fittest and thinnest, some may look at it and think, “Man, did she ever let herself go!” If you put up a picture of yourself at your worst, some may look at it and think, “Man, did she ever let herself go!” If you put up a picture of some attractive girl (which really doesn’t work any way), you may have a problem with your husband making too many trips to the refrigerator and some clueless people will still say, “Man, did she ever let herself go!” And finally, if you put up a picture of some attractive male, people will assume your marriage is on the rocks.

Which is why I have a nice, unassuming calorie wheel on the fridge that will tell me that eating that cookie dough myself will sentence me to seven and a half hours on the treadmill. Seeing this induces such stress, I find myself struggling to open the fridge door, anyways. Luckily, I can’t. It’s been sealed shut with glitter glue.