A Christmas Miracle -- in late April

Yesterday morning Mary alerted me to the fact that the fridge didn't seem to be working. She turned it up a notch, and we waited to see if that would fix it. It did not. The freezer was working, but not the fridge. Hmmm.

So late in the day I looked in my Home Maintenance for Dummies book. Nothing. Next I consulted the good old interweb. There I found some tips, and even some basic education in how refridgerators work (something I had never thought much about). Further due diligence in the freezer was called for, which meant emptying it out. I secured a cooler from the basement, then another from a neighbor, emptied the freezer's contents into them, spotted likely culprit (ice on the intake vent at the back of the freezer) and melted it down with a hair dryer.

Then I ran to the convenience store and bought some ice in case I was wrong. We repacked the freezer and then put all the really perishable stuff from the fridge in with the ice. Before we went to bed, Mary was quite skeptical about my fix. I also called some neighbors who are down at their beach place and checked into fridge repair folx in the area. My bases were covered.

I guess maybe you didn't need all that detail. 

Meanwhile, overnight, a big storm blew in. It was supposed to, so we weren't really surprised, but I had the windows in the bedroom wide open because I had neglected to pre-ventilate the upstairs before bedtime, being distracted by the fridge stuff. So at 3 in the morning, this intense wind and a little rain started blowing in and I had to get up to close the windows. And I realized that all these bags of groceries were out on the porch from Mary's trip to Trader Joe's (where she blew $367 -- quite a feet at that store) letting the coronavirus age off of them and I was middle-of-the-night anxious for our dry goods. Would they get wet? Would it matter?

In the morning, the fridge was clearly working. Our food was dry. All is well.

Of course, my anxiety about the food is really all about the present situation. I knew we had the means to manage through that, unlike the coronavirus, where the exit strategy is by no means clear. Often it is difficult to talk about it, especially with people from the Northeast. Last Friday I was wrapping up a call with a friend from Princeton and we were each counting our blessings and I said something like "it's all going to turn out fine," but I had to stop myself and add "except for the 2000-odd people who die today." And that was just the Americans. There is the guilt of being relatively secure but more or less powerless to influence the broader picture. All we can do each day is do our best to manage our own corners of the universe and look to do a bit more than that, then eat some dinner and sleep again. Which is always the case, but it's particularly clear now.