Beech Tree News Network

I knew I had better start praying for Mother’s Day weekend the week before Mother’s Day weekend.  Garey’s mom, Aggie, needed two refrigerators and one freezer moved, two of which were in her basement.  Garey and his sister, Charlotte, lined up some help in the form of Charlotte’s son, Brad, and the son of one of their cousins, Patrick, but it was the prep work that had me worried. 

               Garey and I arrived at Aggie’s house on Friday, so we could start clearing a path through the basement for the freezer and refrigerator to be removed.  Aggie’s basement is like a time capsule.  There are old Coca Cola bottles—still filled with cola—metal gas cans, old coolers, coffee cans filled with nails and screws and every bug and weed killer manufactured in the US since WWII.

               The reason for all the moving is that Charlotte needs room for a freezer of her own.  Aggie has two freezers, but they are stuffed full.  She usually keeps two working refrigerators, as well, but the one on her sun porch stopped working, hence the moving of the working one from the basement to the sun porch.  The reason Charlotte wants a freezer is that she has decided A. China is going to take our country over, and B. The Apocalypse is going to occur in her lifetime.  She is going to start buying meat in bulk and growing her own vegetables.

               The refrigerator in the basement that was still running was crammed full of seeds from the gardens Aggie and JD (Garey’s dad) had grown from 1947 to JD’s death in 1994.  Garey cleared the seed from that refrigerator on previous trips to Alabama in anticipation of the refrigerator swap.  There was also a small freezer in the basement that Aggie wanted taken to the scrap yard.  Aggie used the freezer in a restaurant she and JD owned when Charlotte was in high school (Charlotte just turned 68 years old). 

               On Saturday, Charlotte brought her pickup over, and we piled it down with old hoses, carpet pieces, 63 plastic flour pots, tin cans, empty detergent bottles, rusted clothes hangers, and tax papers from the 1960s—Garey burned those.  We started to go through the artificial flowers in Aggie’s garage, but after surveying the countless bags, holding enough arrangements to cover every headstone in the Mt. Zion Cemetery on Decoration Day for five years, we decided to save that project for another day.  We took the truck load to the local dump, picked up Brad, and called Patrick for the refrigerator/refrigerator/freezer swap.

               Aggie’s basement door doesn’t open onto a flat surface like a patio or a driveway.  There is a descending set of 6 concrete steps that lead to the basement door, which meant the guys had to move the freezer up the six steps in order to load it onto Garey’s truck.  The next step was to move the non-working refrigerator located on the sun porch down the set of seven steps that lead from the sun porch to the sidewalk.  The working refrigerator in the basement had to be lugged up the six steps leading from the basement door, then up the seven steps leading to the sun porch.  Thank God, it survived the move, and hummed to life when we plugged it in.

                  While the guys had been working out the logistics of the appliance swap, Charlotte and I had to clear out all the stuff Aggie had stored in the non-working refrigerator on the sun porch.  It included, but was not limited to, 40 plastic butter bowls with 39 wrong lids, 3 bags of flour, 2 cans of coffee, 6 bags of yellow rice, a gallon Ziplock bag of Tacco Bell sauce packets, several jars of canned fruit, and two boxes of pancake mix.  We also had to clear off and move a bookshelf and utility table.  On the upside, we found a Reagan era calendar that is probably worth a bit.

               All in all, it was a very productive weekend, and I really enjoyed visiting with Aggie and Charlotte and Brad.  Later, I thought about all the interesting things I found in the basement, like the small metal lard can with the wire handle, the old volumes of the best of Sports Illustrated and the metal Coke Cooler.  Garey and Charlotte fuss at Aggie a lot for keeping all the stuff she does, but one day, when they excavate that basement, and sell some of that stuff that is already worth a fortune, they will appreciate all the things their mother saved.