random thoughts – Day 1,248 – (Thursday) – lesson drawer

Drawer drinks.

There are two produce drawers in the refrigerator. One is where the veggies live when I bother to buy them. The other contains canned beers and Finnish Long Drink, and a bottle of white wine. Delicious chilled liquids.

Today I realized the produce drawer hadn’t been opened in weeks because I haven’t been cooking, eating salad, or even grocery shopping, due to a general lack of interest in any of it. Curious, I opened the produce drawer. It was ugly. 

Three-quarters of a two-week old cucumber wore a fuzzy white sweater. It lounged limply atop a bunch of mostly liquified and nearly unrecognizable Romaine lettuce that was soaking in a puddle of brown juice that had seeped into a nearly full two-pound bag of carrots. Ewwww.

It was a clear case of “out of sight, out of mind.” Unfortunately, now I can’t scrub the memory of it from my mind.

The drawer was removed from the fridge, the mess removed from the drawer, and the liquified goo poured down the sink. The garbage disposal couldn’t be trusted to handle the massive mess of carrots so they were double bagged with the rancid cucumber and set outside in the trash bin where they will continue to decompose until the next trash pickup.

The drawer was soaked with hot soapy water, scoured, and sanitized. The temporarily empty space where the drawer sat was wiped with sanitizing wipes. From the drawer area, eyes wandered upward. On the left side of the top shelf where eyes rarely visit, sat congealed soup from at least two weeks ago. Atop that was a container of the weird rice, cheese, broccoli that was excavated from the freezer around the same time as the soup. More ewwww.

The extended time spent in the refrigerator highlighted how all the shelves would benefit from a tidy up so now that is on the list of delightful domestic crap to be dealt with. Oh, goody. Can’t wait.

Luckily, the second drawer has no danger of cultivating way-past-prime rotted food because it 

The lesson I’m tempted to take from this misadventure is not the healthier one to pay more attention to the perishables and eat them in a timely manner. It’s to fill both drawers with beer and wine, which won’t have time to betray me and spoil. And to stick with the freezer where the ice cream, pizza, and freeze pops live.