Freezer Burn

I can feel the snow falling on my face, because I’m making it fall on my face. In this large metallic box, I am willfully surrounding myself with ice, frost, and snow, a seeming death trap. The floor is slick; a fan whirrs; my plastic ice chipper is broken. It’s time to inventory the fuck out of this freezer.

For the past three days I’ve spent more time than not tackling the glacial shelves of meat in our freezer, cleaning, sorting, and counting the hundreds of packages of meat we have. The saga begins well before my time in many places – the time someone else cleaned out the freezer and then left the door open, thereby coating the entire room with a heavy frost; the time someone put together an order for someone and then buried it at the back of the room to be lost; the time the slaughterhouse labeled both the pork rib chops and the pork loin chops the same thing: pork chops. But the story ends now.

Here, a box so frozen over I can’t open it to figure out what’s inside. Here, all the ground veal in the lamb boxes because someone thought veal and lamb are the same thing. Here, a magical box of sausage – we were out of sausage!

Counting can be much more difficult than you might presume. How did 14 packs of beef bones become 19 on the second counting? Better count again. Why are there beef bones in three disparate sections of the freezer?

At one point, my gloves become so frozen over that it feels like I’m wearing boxing gloves of pure ice. I can’t take them off. My shoes are quickly headed toward the same fate.

I dust the shelves. I scrape the ceiling, I scrub the floor. I hammer boxes to break the ice. I shovel out an entire 5 gallon bucket full of fine frost, and at least three times that much goes down the sink I use to aid me in my quest to remove ice rinks from the meat packages. I wish I had thicker long underwear.

At the end of three days, my list is soggy, my markers nonfunctional, and my mustache could be broken off with an ice pick. But this freezer is in order, dammit. I wish I had thicker long underwear.