The Tale of the Stinky Cheese And a Door Ajar

Has your refrigerator door ever been left ajar overnight?

Even if you didn't mean to, it can happen, especially during the ever-crucial hours I will dub the "Post-Midnight Chowdown". People aren't with it, it's 2 a.m., and they just want a piece of ham or something.

Well, it remains a mystery as to who the true perpetrator was, but this occurred in my abode recently. I returned from a rousing, stimulating day of Property and Constitutional Law. I open the door, and I was thwacked in the face.

The place emitted a noxious stench of warm cheese, rotten eggs, liquified butter, and other miscellaneous unpleasant scents. My unsalted butter had melted, leaking all over the fridge and the floor, and a left-over yogurt parfait had congealed almost completely. My apartment comrade and I, we tried Febreeze, scented candles, window-cracking and Indian Cheese dances (ok, only I did the dancing), and only through a combination of these efforts over a period lasting hours was the monstrous miasma mutilated.

That malodorous plague left us, but what did it take away? And I don't speak of my $10 double-cream brie (though I do miss its rich flavor and delightfully gooey texture).

It took away my trust in the refrigerator, or rather, my ability to close it. It's going to be a while before I'll be able to look at a refrigerator only once, because who would risk having something that foul, that invasive to your existence creep in again? "Did I close the veggie drawer all the way?", "Is this damn thing really shut?", "Do they make extra-super-resilient butter?". These are questions that will coarse through my mind every time I lay eyes on that contraption for a solid week or two.

I don't want to have that relationship with my refrigerator. I'd strongly prefer to just go with it, to get my string cheese and Diet Ginger Ale and return to my affairs. One has to look back though, at least for a while. I'd like to tell myself that it's not my fault OR the refrigerator's fault, that sometimes the door is left open, all your stuff goes bad, and it does not bear anything on either party. And maybe that is the truth.

Scariest about all of this, though, is that there is no guarantee this won't happen again . Unless I stop buying brie, yogurt and other perishable items, that is. But dammit, some of the best foodstuffs are perishables. I would be committing a grand disservice upon myself if I stopped eating things I loved to eat just because some freak thing might happen and it'll all get moldy and stinky. It's no way to live, folks.

So, buy all the cheese you want friends, put it in your fridge and fear not the possibility that you will return to a stench.

For how indeed can we truly appreciate the fragrance of a rose if you have not smelt the stinky cheese?