Our refrigerator art is a gallery of our life as a family
There's our daughter smiling as she shares a wondrous gaze with the white-breasted nuthatch perched on her outstretched hand on a cold winter morning in Ipswich. And there we are, me and the kids, gathered high up in the Green Monster seats at Fenway days after the Red Sox won the 2004 World Series as the duck boat parade was set to commence.
So densely covering the surface of our Westinghouse that even the appliance's logo is obscured, the refrigerator is an album of our lives stationed strategically in a place where the images cannot be unseen.
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I always stop to look at the refrigerator pictures at the homes of my friends and family. Nearly everyone indulges, adding drawings from grandchild artists and magnets from trips abroad. There are no rules.
In a life filled with photographs, mostly digitized and on our mobile devices, shared on Facebook or stuffed away in dust-covered albums, these prints, held in place with magnets, are chosen carefully to create a daily notice of what matters. Even those who are gone remain in our sightlines every day as we reach for the milk, the eggs, the ketchup, or a beer. You can't get the mayo without glancing at Aunt Gloria, or our son and daughter-in-law, then newly engaged, or the brand new pictures of their baby, our first grandchild. My wife and her beloved sisters welcome anyone needing to grab the ice cube tray from the freezer.
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Every picture is a life story, the opening paragraph of a narrative journey. The quality of the pictures is of less importance than the subjects. It's a retrospective of family connections, a sometimes static, occasionally changing collection of the faces of those who make or made our lives worth living. They remind us of the tensile strength of these relationships that formed the fabric of our lives. There's no official entry requirement but the space is sacred in its own idiosyncratic way. You don't get included if you are outside the circle. Our new son-in-law was thrilled when he first made it on the fridge.
In our kitchen, a gathering place for company as in many homes, visitors often comment on the images while meals simmer on the stove and cocktails get mixed. There are moments of recognition or laughter or surprise, sadness co-mingled with joy. As we share the stories that each image evokes, our friends react to this compilation of lives well lived with the inevitable mix of happiness and sorrow that every family album conjures. Who is here? Who is gone? How much we miss them.
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You can marvel at the Guggenheim or the Louvre, but there is an allure to the refrigerator pictures that is far more personal. The kitchen gallery demands a different kind of attention, based not on often-obscure subjects in a masterpiece but on the conventional images of shared love and devotion.
Maybe it's the timelessness and that no one ever really dies if they remain forever in our field of vision. Maybe we just welcome the reminders, on full display, of who we really are.
Glenn Rifkin is a journalist and author based in Acton. Send comments to magazine@globe.com. TELL YOUR STORY. Email your 650-word unpublished essay on a relationship to connections@globe.com. Please note: We do not respond to submissions we won't pursue.
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