My refrigerator door has eleven notes on it right now. I counted this morning while I was waiting for coffee to brew, standing there reading each one like it was the first time, which for a couple of them, honestly, it might as well have been.
Some are useful, current, doing exactly the job a note is supposed to do. Most are not. Most have been there long enough that I’ve stopped seeing them at all, the way you stop hearing a clock ticking in a room you spend a lot of time in.
The Ones Still Doing Their Job
There’s a note about a dentist appointment next month, written in my own hand, clear and dated, doing exactly what it’s supposed to. There’s a grocery list, half crossed off, from a trip I apparently didn’t finish or didn’t need everything on the list after all. There’s a reminder to call about the gutters, which I did eventually deal with, and which I should probably take down now that it’s resolved, but haven’t.
The Ones That Have Gone Strange
Then there’s a note that just says ask W about the thing, no other context, no date that I can find on it, and I genuinely cannot tell you what the thing is or how long that note has been up there. I assume W is Wanda, which narrows it down somewhat, but I’ve talked to her plenty of times since I apparently wrote that note and never once thought to ask about any specific thing, which suggests either I forgot entirely or the question resolved itself without my noticing.
There’s another that says check the date, which is almost funny in how unhelpful it’s become, since the note itself has no date on it to check against anything. I have no idea what date I was supposed to be checking or why it mattered enough to write down.
Why I Never Take Them Down
I’ve thought about why these strange, useless notes stay up as long as they do instead of getting cleared away once they’ve clearly outlived their purpose. Part of it is simple inattention, the fridge door becomes wallpaper after a while, and I stop actually reading most of what’s on it in any given week. But part of it, I think, is a small reluctance to throw away a piece of paper that has my own handwriting on it, even when the content is meaningless to me now. It feels like discarding a thought I once had, however minor that thought turns out to have been.
A Note About Dot
One of the notes is just a reminder about Dot’s vet appointment from months ago, long since attended, that I’ve kept up because it has the vet’s phone number written on it in case I need it again, which I’ve now transferred to my phone anyway, making the note fully redundant, though it remains on the fridge regardless.
What Wanda Thinks of This Habit
I mentioned the fridge to Wanda once, half joking about my own inability to throw the notes away, and she told me she doesn’t write anything down anymore at all, that she trusts her memory or doesn’t, and either way a piece of paper isn’t going to fix the difference. I don’t fully share her confidence in that approach, given some of what I’ve noticed about her memory lately, but I understood the sentiment behind it.
The Cleanup I Attempted
I did try, this same morning, to finally clear off the useless ones. I got as far as taking down the gutter reminder, since that one at least I could confirm was fully resolved, and then stalled out on the ask W about the thing note, unable to bring myself to throw it away without knowing what it referred to, on the off chance it mattered more than I currently remember. It’s still up there. I suspect it will be for a while longer.
What the Fridge Actually Says About Me
I think if someone studied my refrigerator door closely enough, they’d get a fairly accurate picture of how my mind actually works, a mix of things I’m handling well, things I’ve let slide past their usefulness, and at least one genuine mystery I’ve apparently decided isn’t worth the effort of solving. That seems like a reasonably honest snapshot, messy as it is.
The Mystery, Solved by Accident
I did eventually figure out what the thing with W referred to, purely by accident, weeks after I’d given up trying. Wanda mentioned, completely unprompted, that she’d been meaning to ask me for weeks whether I still had her late husband’s ladder, the one I’d apparently borrowed from her years ago and never quite gotten around to returning. It clicked immediately. I did still have it, tucked in the back of my garage, and had been meaning to ask her something about it myself at some point, likely whether she still wanted it back or was fine with me keeping it permanently.
I took the ladder over that same afternoon, note finally resolved after who knows how many months of sitting there unexplained. I took the note down too, at last, and felt a small, disproportionate satisfaction watching it go into the recycling. It’s strange how much relief a scrap of paper with five confusing words on it can provide once it finally makes sense again.