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Cool country welcome chills ex-city slickers
(by Hertha Binder - December 02, 2009)
OF KIDS AND NATURE, BY HERTHA BINDER
Cool country welcome chills ex-city slickers
For us ex-city slickers, living in the country was full of surprises. We had moved from Cleveland to Geauga County early one summer.
One day soon after, while finishing our supper, we heard a car crunch to a halt and its door being slammed. At that time we had no neighbor for a third of a mile on either side, so, if we could hear a car, it was in our driveway. My husband, Tom, and I both stepped outside.
A sleek-looking guy walked up. "Howdy, folks." His wide grin exposed nicotine-stained teeth as he stretched out his hand to shake ours, and, willy-nilly, we responded.
"What can we do for you?" asked Tom.
"I'm Charlie Mulcher," he said. (I've long forgotten his real name.) "I understand you folks just moved out here."
"That's right." Tom invited him with a gesture to sit on our porch.
"Guess you've got to drive purty far to get some groceries."
"We pick them up on our way home from work." I sat down beside Tom.
"Now, that's a lot of worry. Wouldn't it be much easier on you to have a whole freezer full of good, nourishing stuff right here?"
"Oh, boy, that'd be too expensive," I said.
"Betcha it ain't." Charlie pulled a colored brochure out of his briefcase. "Look here, folks, you can have a whole side of prime beef, some pork, veal or chicken -- it's your choice -- and a large selection of vegetables. They'd be healthy for the young man here." He smiled at 4-year-old Pete, who hid behind me.
Tom has always liked plenty of back-up supplies of any kind, be it concrete blocks, two-by-fours or food. His eyes started to shine. "That's terrific."
Charlie showed us that we'd be much cheaper off with his food than getting it little by little in the store. For the price, the freezer was practically free. "You folks can pay in monthly installments, but, of course, it'd save you more money yet if you pay it all upfront."
"Excuse us for a moment." I pulled Tom into the house, and he convinced me that buying all that stuff was the best thing we could do. In those days, we didn't yet know that, if anything sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
A few days later, we were the proud owners of a shiny new freezer chuck full with food. The balance in our checkbook was $7.63.
After a few weeks, Pete pouted, "That meat's too tough, Mommy. I don't want it."
"Why don't you eat the vegetables? Those lima beans with corn taste very good."
"We had 'em yesterday."
"No, we had string beans with carrots."
"It's all the same."
Next day, we stopped at a McDonald's to get some "real" food and make Pete happy. I was glad that the kid gave me an excuse to eat a Big Mac myself.
By mid-January, we had used up half of our supply. And then it happened. When I opened the freezer, the packages were all wet. The whole mess was thawing! Now, what could we do? Charlie could not be reached. The telephone of his company had been disconnected.
A local repairman looked at the freezer and its labels, shaking his head. "We'd have to order a part of the unit from Taiwan. You can't get spare parts for this brand here." He had a grim chuckle. "If you find the address in Taiwan, we might get the part in four to six weeks."
"Bu-but all our food will spoil," I stammered.
"Either that or you'd get a new freezer." He smiled. Seems he smelled a good commission coming his way.
But our budget was already stretched beyond its limit. Our house was a fixer-upper, and, although Tom did most of the needed work himself, the material -- roofing shingles, concrete, wood paneling -- and, most of all, the high mortgage payments were all we could afford. A second freezer within less than a year was out of the question.
Fortunately, Tom had a unique idea. Heavy bags of salt were in the trunk of our car for better traction. He took them out and loaded all our frozen food into the trunk. It fit! Since the temperature was in the teens or single digits, our food was safe, and it was even heavier than the salt bags.
By March, the frozen supplies had dwindled to an amount that fit into the little freezer compartment above the fridge. Nothing had spoiled.
In the decades that followed, we had several freezers, not as cheap as the first one but more reliable. None, however, was as ingenious as our car's trunk in the frigid Geauga winter.
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