The Red Azalea

     

Backyard Glynmoore

  So it was during the time when Sarah and John and Virginia and the cats were moving from my house to an apartment in Atlanta that I happened to look in my freezer in the garage.

        When my Mom started work back when I was nine years old. One of the things she really wanted was a freezer. She said it would be better than just the freezer compartment of the refrigerator. She would be able to get extra groceries – especially to stock up on stuff on sale; Christmas cookies could be baked early and stored in the freezer; and……there was a potential for dessert every night after dinner! She and Dad got an upright freezer which stood in the garage at the house on Heinrich and then in the basement when we moved to Zimmerman. We did not have dessert every night – seems to me I was the one responsible for preparing said desserts, and I often failed to deliver – brownies were over- or under-cooked, jello takes more than an afternoon to set, omygosh that’s not how you make pudding! – but after a while, there was almost always ice cream in the freezer. Mom and Dad occasionally purchased, I think it was a quarter of a cow – with all the cuts and packages in the freezer keeping us well stocked in meals for months. Once in a while we froze homemade strawberry or raspberry or grape jam. The freezer was usually kept fairly full.

        And the idea of a freezer, based on my childhood experience and plans for the future – that is, stocking up on stuff that is on sale, always seemed like a good one. I don’t remember now when we got the freezer – a chest freezer that is in the garage. It is most likely that we got it after moving here to Georgia – maybe when we were renting on Realm? – I remember we had special voltage put into the garage in this house to accommodate the freezer – so I’m thinking we already had it by then.

        Anyway, it ultimately did not get used for much. I would put extra bags of frozen vegetables and Mrs. Smith’s on-sale pies in there – and forget about them. And the Christmas cookies – while they were a fun project baking them with my Mom, with bagging and freezing them an efficient way to get a lot of bunches done – I’ve discovered over the years that I prefer my Christmas cookies fresh rather than frozen and thawed. We would store bird feed in the freezer because the pest control man said the bird feed could be the source of the moth infestation we had for a while in the house. Ice – we kept bags of ice in the freezer for parties and just to fill up the space. After Mike came along and he went caribou hunting in Quebec, there were some packages of caribou meat we stored in the freezer and managed to use in a timely fashion. But bottom line, we really did not need a freezer after all.

        So Sarah and John moved in for a few months, and one day when they were in the process of moving out, I looked in the freezer to see if there was anything of theirs that they might want to take with them.

        I opened the lid, saw a plastic bag sealed with a twist tie sitting in one of the baskets – after my brain processed what it was I was seeing, I closed the lid and sent an email to Sarah.

        “Is there a placenta in the freezer?”

        An email was sent back.

        “I’ll take care of it.”

        Today, six years later, the freezer is unplugged and empty – an all too handy shelf for our garage clutter – we have tried to sell it, and we’ve tried to give it away – and that is without the placenta story! Perhaps now that I’m retired, I could plug it in again and stock it with meats and sweets – but it does not seem likely.

        In the backyard, there is a red azalea that was planted five years ago, nourished underground by what was in the bag I saw in the freezer that one day. The story is Sarah’s, and she tells it so very well – this is just my little side spin on it.

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