Twenty-Seven Winters of Freezers
The first freezer in this family was bought in the winter of 1999, the same winter the notebook began, and it was a small white chest with a humming motor and a handle that had to be pulled hard. Nonna wrote it in the first page, along with the fact that the ice cream took six hours to freeze in it, which nobody believed until she drew the clock faces.
There have been four since. The second was the round one with the blue lid that sat in the kitchen and warmed the room in the summer. The third is the chest in the cellar with the temperamental door, the one that stopped on the coldest evening of July and came back after three days with a new part and a small hole cut in the wall behind it. The fourth is the small silent one that stands in the kitchen now and holds everything.
Twenty-seven winters of freezers is what the notebook says at the top of the page, and it is the sentence we read out loud at the end of every season, because it sounds like a fact about machines and is really a fact about a woman who wrote down what she needed to remember and then kept doing it for twenty-seven years. The freezer was never the point. The freezer was the reason the notebook was necessary.
My grandmother would have liked the last one. It is silent, it is small, it freezes a tub in four hours. She said, more than once and usually to my mother, that six hours was a proper wait and four hours was a bit too quick, and that the waiting was half the point of a freezer.
The season closes here. The pears are finished, the chestnuts are in the pan, the pumpkins are done, and the notebook has thirty-one pages of this year in it. Next April we will open it on the same date and start again, which is the whole plan and the only one we have ever had.