My refrigerator is the bane of my kitchen. It’s too small for a family of five, especially when three of those people are growing teenagers. The shelves are always packed, and it doesn’t help that I detest cleaning it out. I find it tedious and laborious to take out all the food, go through said food and trash anything that’s expired. Then, there’s removing the shelves and drawers to wash them, then return them to the spaces where I’m certain they didn’t fit before. Finally, there’s the process of trying to put all the food back in the refrigerator in some kind of organized manner so that, hopefully, there’ll be room to add a gallon of milk after I go to the grocery store. Needless to say, I don’t clean out the refrigerator often.

The family and I went camping at the beach over spring break, where I ditched all responsibilities and thoughts of to-do lists that awaited me back home. I propped myself up in a chair on the beach and read all day, every day. My refrigerator never even came to mind.

But after five days, we returned home and one of my first tasks after walking in the door was to empty the cooler and put all its contents into the cold, dirty, stainless steel box. When I opened the refrigerator, I knew I’d made a mistake by not cleaning out food before we left for our trip. Something reeked! It only took a couple of minutes of shifting food around to find the culprit. A ring of shrimp that must’ve been about two weeks old had spoiled and was now stinking up the entire kitchen. I immediately tossed the yellowed shrimp into the garbage disposal and threw the plastic ring into the garbage.