Honestly - the Things You Find in a Freezer!

As most of you know, I am going through what feels like a long, drawn-out divorce right now. I'm sure no divorce is easy, and this one may not be all that bad, comparably. But since it's the only one I've ever been through, it feels that way to me. I am in the process of selling my house, and due to the market conditions, I've not had much interest. So, I am slowly decluttering, packing, etc., both to better-prepare the house for showing, and to get ready to eventually move.

I have had a lot of help in this process, most notably from my best cousins ever, Mindi and Kim. Last Friday, I was having a pity-party kind of day, left over from an emotional meeting with my attorney and the soon-to-be-ex. Mindi had planned to come help me pack and sort some more, but I just didn't have it in me. I called her, bawling, to beg off, and bless her heart, she and Kim showed up on my doorstep a couple of hours later, anyway, with root beer and ice cream in hand.

We had an absolutely lovely time sitting around the kitchen table, eating (drinking?) root beer floats and laughing about squishing bugs and snakes (Mindi can do bugs, but Kim and I can't - however, snakes creep Mindi out, but they don't bother Kim or me at all) and how hard it is to patiently listen to seemingly never-ending stories from your children when all you want is a few minutes to yourself to unwind before bedtime or shower or just breathe!

Well, I freely admit to not being the best housekeeper in the land. For people who know me at work, they would think this out-of-character, but at home, I agonize over decisions. If I have pink and white shirt that needs to be washed, I dawdle, going back and forth over whether it should go in the "whites" laundry pile, or the "reds" laundry pile. If I have duplicates of an item, I struggle over throwing away or otherwise getting rid of the old one (I might NEED it!) - thus the explanation for the work described in the first paragraph!

Anyway, mid-root beer float party, I had to run out and pick up the twins from a "back-to-school" party they had been at with friends from their elementary school. When we got back home, I was surprised to see Mindi and Kim cleaning out my refrigerator! I was chagrined to realize that when they had tried to put the root beer away, they couldn't find a place for it - so they were compelled to clean out my refrigerator in the process of making room for the 2-liter bottle of root beer. For the record, the oldest item in there were some bacon bits that expired in 2000....

I helped finish the fridge, and we started on the freezer. Mychael came down stairs and said, "Hey, we might still have Cyd's snake in there - did we ever bury it?" I had forgotten all about "Slips," a little green garter snake that Cydanie had as a pet a couple of years ago. It didn't last long - it was our first experience with reptilian pets and either we didn't care for it correctly, or it wasn't very healthy to start with, or the stress of bringing it home did it in. It only lived for a month or so after we brought him (her? Hard to tell, with snakes...) home from the pet store. It was winter when it died, and Cyd wanted to bury it, but we couldn't because the ground was frozen. So, we put it in a little baggie, sealed it up, and put it in the freezer to await a proper burial service in the spring.

I was telling Kim and Mindi this story as Mindi was wiping out the door of the freezer and I was working with Kim on deciding what in the freezer would go, and what could stay (yes, this decision-making stuff is a two-person job for me). I was fairly certain that we had already done away with Slips - I hadn't seen him in a very long time so I figured someone had finally sent him to his final resting place in the bottom of the trash bin. It could have even been me, and I had simply forgotten - my memory is not what it used to be!

Shortly after I had assured them that we likely would NOT be finding any snakes in the freezer, Kim reached over to the door next to Mindi, grabbed a little plastic bag with Christmas packages printed on it, and said, "Here, this can go - it has Christmas presents on it!" All of a sudden, Kim screamed! She dropped the bag and bolted out of the kitchen. Mindi was hot on her heels, screaming hysterically as well! And I? Well, I was just standing there, looking around wondering what the heck just happened! Then it dawned on me - could Slips be in the Christmas baggie?

Sure enough - I picked up the baggie and there was Slips, remarkably well preserved. For the morbidly curious, he had little freezer burn, considering he had been in there for at least two years. All of us - including the twins - were now laughing so hard we could hardly breathe. I thought perhaps Kim had picked up the bag knowing that Slips was in there to save Mindi from discovering it, given how she feels about snakes. But no, she was not being altruistic at all. It was just a split-second thought on Kim's part. Sad to say, Slips didn't get his burial - he went in the garbage sack with the rest of the freezer's contents, baggie and all.

Perhaps it was one of those "you had to be there" moments. I am leaving out the parts about how far away some people ran, and who was laughing so hard she drooled, to protect the guilty. However, I bet the next time Kim and Mindi go to clean out a freezer, they will be a little bit more wary about just diving in. Though I hope it wasn't sufficiently traumatic to discourage them from bringing root beer floats to me some other time....I promise there are no more snakes in my freezer.