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This just in from Waco, Texas. Long-time resident, Gayle Lintz, reports that, Tuesday, late afternoon, she went to her kitchen to prepare a dinner-time meal for her husband.

“I was planning to attend my Knitting Group’s meeting at 5:00. I opened the freezer section of my refrigerator and reached in for a frozen chicken breast to heat up for him to eat when he got home. My hand touched a freezer-weight zip-locking bag of previously sauteed onions and peppers. It was soft. Next to that was a bag that held some leftover spaghetti in marinara sauce that had unexpectedly begun to smell, far sooner than it should have. My husband had bagged it up and put it in the freezer until trash day. (It smelled that bad). It was absolutely squishy. Homemade popsicles that I had made for my grandson had turned back into apple juice.”

The ice maker with the ho-hum, maybe I will, maybe I won’t attitude

Mrs. Lintz says that, a couple of weeks earlier, the ice maker had stopped making ice.

“We had the ice maker replaced a couple of years ago,” she explained. “It wasn’t the same ice maker as we had before, because they don’t manufacture that kind of ice maker any more. We bought this fridge in 1995, so it’s pretty dated. The new ice maker worked pretty well, but recently was sometimes a little erratic. And I said, ‘There’s no point in replacing it now. That’s just throwing good money away.”

Goodbye, old friend.

She suggested to Mr. Lintz that they consider purchasing a new refrigerator as a Christmas gift for themselves. He thought that was a sensible idea.

“I measured the fridge and had planned, soon, to go and look at what was available. We just didn’t move quickly enough.”

She made the bad-news phone call to him at work and they made a plan to meet later at Home Depot. Meanwhile, she pulled out white plastic, tie-top trash bags. “He thought I should use the big black outdoor bags,” she explained. “But I said that, if I filled those up with squishy, smelly stuff from the fridge, I wouldn’t be able to pick them up. I have to pack light, when it comes to trash bags I have to carry out to the bin.”

The Lintz home was built in 1959. “There’s a finite space for a refrigerator,” Lintz explains. “There’s a counter on one side and the wall of the pantry on the other. We don’t have the financial reserve to remodel the kitchen AND buy a fridge [and pay bills and live from month to month]. We’re not candidates for a Fixer-Upper. We’re stuck with 34 inches of width space and 68 inches of height. I’d been, a while back, looking at fridges, just to see what was available. I wanted a white, side-by-side, with an ice maker and ice dispenser in the door.”

There was some good news, and then better news, at the Home Depot store. Most of the refrigerators on display at the home store are not limited to the color and size that’s there. That stainless steel fridge you like might also come in black and white and maybe almond. The Home Depot appliance guy (who said, “Twenty years!?! You got your money’s worth out of that one!) helped Gayle find one she liked (white, good width, side-by-side w/ice dispenser in the door). It would have to be ordered and could not be delivered until September 28.

“I said that I’d already thought that we might have to go to the appliance rental place and get something small and cheap for a couple of weeks,” she says. “If we needed to wait.”

“And as we talked, I said I was sorry that our space was limited, because I really like those fridges that I’d seen advertised in magazines. You know, the ones with two doors for the cooling part, at the top, and then a drawer at the bottom that holds the frozen stuff. And, you WILL NOT believe this…he said that they ALSO came in a not-so-wide model!”

This was the example at the store. Ours will be a little narrower.

The salesman showed her a version that came in white in a 34-inch width. “Of course,” she tells us, “it’s a little bit more expensive, but when you divide that out by 20 years, it’s not very much per year. And it’s energy efficient and has great features, and it’s so pretty. And we can get it on Monday!”

So they sealed the deal.

Meanwhile, in the kitchen there’s a cooler of ice, where medications that have to stay chilled are snuggled up to cheese slices and a couple of eggs.

Gayle did describe to us one little regret she experienced in the refrigerator-shopping venues.

Not one speck of fake food to entertain shoppers.

“When I was a girl, and we would go with our parents to places like Sears and appliance stores, my sister and I would open all the refrigerator doors and the lids of those big chest freezers. Those places used to put fake food in there. Like a big plastic turkey on a shelf. And fake eggs in the egg holders in the doors. (You know, they don’t make egg holders in the doors any more. Someone discovered that eggs need to be in a colder part of a refrigerator.) And there might be a milk carton and juice bottle (for show, obviously). And fake steaks and hamburger patties in the freezers. We loved that! Looking at refrigerators and freezers isn’t quite as much fun as it used to be. At least not for kids.”

A blessing, reports Gayle Lintz, is when this debacle occurred (last Tuesday). “Our regular trash day,” she explains, “is Monday. But because of the Labor Day holiday, our make-up day is Wednesday. So, instead of smelly trash having to spend a week in our September heat in a dark bin, I took everything out on Tuesday afternoon. And all that spoiled/spoiling stuff got picked up Wednesday.”

He went on, “No one cuts up a fine silk scarf to patch old work clothes; you want fabrics that match. And you don’t put your wine in cracked bottles.

Matthew 9:16,17 (The Message)

Mrs. Lintz plans to put her good, fresh food in a refrigerator that will keep it good and fresh.

According to the Mr. Appliance website, fridges last anywhere from 10 to 18 years. So the family is good for a while. The dryer, however, is living on borrowed time. Waaaaaay borrowed.