The milk was the first thing I’d noticed. One day in late July, bottles of whole milk for coffee and skim milk for Grape-Nuts suddenly curdled overnight in my refrigerator. Next, in the crisper drawer, halved avocadoes and string beans molded in an eyeblink and tender, young local carrots went limp just as fast. Soon, the yogurt was covered in blue fuzz, the feta cheese in white fuzz.

In the freezer, meanwhile, the quarts of vegetable stock I’d just put up never froze, while the smoked salmon, the cookie dough, the butter, the cranberries, the beautiful Vermont bacon, and on and on, unfroze. As for ice cubes to keep us cool in my no-AC house during the 90-degree plus days that week? Dream on.

Equipment failures at the worst possible time are a recurrent theme in my kitchen. Several years ago, a few hours before guests were due to arrive for the Thanksgiving feast, my oven went bust. A decade before that, you could have found me in my kitchen on a Sunday morning in Texas despairing as I peered into the oven at a pan of labor-intensive sticky buns mid-bake, brunch guests expected at any moment. A transformer down the block had blown, and my oven was temporary collateral damage.

This summer, it was the refrigerator, and its timing was, again, impeccable. It failed in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave and two days before I had to drive to New York to pick up my 93-year-old mother for her annual getaway in Maine. Given its age – 24 years – fixing it was pointless, I learned after some quick calling around. According to the experts, my KitchenAid refrigerator was both an energy hog and an old man.

As I frantically tried to finish up work ahead of a week off and ready the house for my mother – tripping hazards removed, nightlights secured, rugs taped down and door to the cellar with steep staircase taped shut, drugstore items purchased, social visits scheduled, uncomplicated movies and books deliberated over and acquired, diet prepared for and accommodated (as much as possible given the malfunctioning refrigerator) – it was a toss-up whose meltdown was worse: The refrigerator’s or mine.

THAW OUT

Other factors aggravated the situation. It was peak farmers market season and I’d waited all year to cook with the (finally) ripe, local blink-and-you-miss-them delicate summer fruits (sour cherries! wild blueberries!) and vegetables (zucchini blossoms! English peas!). This summer’s cooking projects would have to be put on ice as my refrigerator was operating with the merest suggestion of cool.

More visitors lay in my immediate future: Lee, who would be housesitting while I attended a family reunion. And Katharina, who would be coming to visit from Germany with her teenage twins. How was I to manage any of this without a working refrigerator?

Over the next couple of days, I frantically made BLTs for lunch and smoked salmon omelets for breakfast. I baked scones to try to use up the butter, tossing in chopped, meant-to-be-frozen cranberries with the same idea. Some of the soured milk went into pancakes.

But this race against time was a losing proposition. Quickly, inevitably, I began chucking spoilt food into my compost bin: Out went the lobster shells and vegetable peelings I’d been saving for stock, the (once) frozen haddock and ground pork, the lemons, the rhubarb from my garden, the dinner leftovers, and a couple of quarts of milk. As for the pickles, sesame oil, pomegranate molasses and the dozens of other small jars of this and that that at one time or another I had apparently considered essential kitchen supplies, I just hoped they could survive their newly coolish environment.

My neighbor Jen solved my immediate problem. She invited me to store a few necessities in her refrigerator while my mother visited. I heaved a sigh of relief, and on Saturday morning, my partner and I headed south on the long, hot drive to fetch mom. That evening, settled on my mother’s sofa bed for the night before we were to return to Maine the next day, I got a text from Jen. She had COVID.

PLAN B

My mother had the best solution: “Why don’t you call the landlord, dear?”

There was just one hitch: I own the house, a fact, like many, she no longer remembers. Shopping for a new refrigerator, even online, while taking care of her was unrealistic. For at least that week, Maine’s 2022 span of unrelenting heat and sun, we would have to limp by refrigerator-less.

Another potential fix came from a farmer as I was shopping at the Portland Farmers’ Market. The Amish community settled near him, he told me, still cuts blocks of ice from lakes and rivers in the winter, which they use all summer in iceboxes to keep their food cold. But, he cheerfully went on, you’ve missed the ice-harvesting season.

Thankfully, my next-door neighbors came to the rescue. In exchange for visiting their lonely cat while they vacationed, I could make use of their fridge while my mom vacationed. Deal!

At the same time, I posted my plight to my virtual Nextdoor neighbors, asking if anybody on the community website had a small, portable refrigerator that I could use. Seventeen Portlanders posted suggestions for securing a refrigerator fast, as well as offers to loan me – even give me – dormitory refrigerators they no longer used. The 17th offer came from an actual friend, an old family friend, not an online one: “Peggy! We have one too,” she posted. And she not only came by the very next day to deliver her 17- by 17-inch refrigerator, but she spent more than an hour on the deck reminiscing with my mother, who, miraculously, remembered her.

We set up the mini-refrigerator in the basement, perched atop the washing machine, where the plug could reach the outlet. Over the next several weeks, I was forced to reform my refrigerator maximalist ways, to winnow down my perishable goods to the small group of items I could not live without. They were:

Milk, for coffee and cereal.

Blueberries in Maine’s short-lived blueberry season.

My sourdough starter, Zola.

A block of tofu and a block of cheese.

Eggs.

One daily vegetable for lunch, another for dinner.

Cooking, too, required creativity and downsizing. Roast chicken and fish disappeared from my table, as did my routine of big-batch cooking on Sundays to set myself up for busy work weeks. Daily grain salads, peanut butter sandwiches, rice, noodles, canned beans, canned fish, tomatoes and corn on the cob – those last two, both in season and refrigerator-averse – made frequent appearances. Thankfully, the pandemic had already honed my can-do, make-do cooking skills.

I’ve often read that the invention of refrigeration changed the world. Seasons and distances disappeared, preservation skills dwindled, diets transformed. Now, to a small extent, I understood firsthand.

ANALYSIS PARALYSIS

It turns out, there is something worse than not having a working refrigerator in the middle of a heat wave, at least for me. That would be buying a new refrigerator.

I made a list of what I wanted: reliability, longevity and environmental friendliness, characteristics that proved difficult to evaluate. I explored refrigerators on the internet, diligently reading Consumer Reports and Wirecutter, then going down the rabbit hole of blogs, websites and YouTube. Friends told me about their refrigerators. A bottom freezer, one told me, is “life-changing.” Another suggested the German brand Liebherr, which he said, is “smart and precise, as Germans are.”

I read online reviews – a mistake? I cannot understand many commenters’ inexplicable habit of reviewing an appliance they’ve only just purchased. “So far, so good,” one wrote. “We’ve only had it a short while and we are hoping the temperature continues to be consistent,” another posted. Also, no matter how many good reviews a product gets, just when you are beginning to feel hopeful, you inevitably encounter a “worst purchase I’ve ever made” pan.

I visited two local appliance stores and communicated with a third by email, taking notes, then returning to online research. I re-read Consumer Reports, and Wirecutter, and the chapter in Gretchen Rubin’s “The Happiness Project” that focuses on which buying style would bring me the most happiness. All I wanted to do was go to the beach.

I was in a stage that Prof. Richard Bilodeau, who teaches a class in consumer behavior at the University of Southern Maine School of Business told me is called, unsurprisingly, “The search for information.” Also unsurprising, with big ticket items like a refrigerator, this stage usually takes longer. Bilodeau, incidentally, is in the market for a new refrigerator himself, and one of his criteria never occurred to me: He has a magnet collection, so the surface of his new appliance will need to be magnetic.

Bilodeau also told me that humans have a natural tendency to trust a bad review. “We might see 99 positive reviews and one negative review, but psychologically, many people will dwell on the one negative review,” he said. He added, if not in so many words because he was polite, that I was showing my age. The under-35 set, it seems, doesn’t read, or trust, Consumer Reports.

I named the next purchasing stage I reached “Dragging My Feet.” Three weeks passed. I was overwhelmed by the number of choices and the amount of (contradictory) information. Also, I was haunted by ghosts of purchases past – the Toyota Camry I mistakenly bought when I lived in Houston, for one. The salesman convinced me I would be unsafe in the smaller car I wanted. Plus, he added, it’ll fit your golf clubs.

I don’t play golf.

When the weather finally cooled, my refrigerator showed renewed signs of life: Brisk air greeted me as I plucked a jar of mustard from the door. As an experiment, I left a cup of milk inside overnight – and it did not sour. A reprieve! Maybe I could postpone my purchase? Deep down, though, I was pretty sure I’d be tempting fate.

I returned to Agren Appliance in South Portland. This time, I carried a bag with several quart mason jars, a gallon jug of maple syrup and a half-sheet pan – all items that I routinely keep in my refrigerator – to test for fit. Chris Gebhardt, the nice salesman who’d helped me last time around, greeted me. He didn’t realize it, but he was about to become my therapist.

When I moaned about my inability to make a simple purchasing decision, he diagnosed “paralysis by analysis. It’s a real thing. A lot of us suffer from it.”

My colleague Zack was equally sympathetic. “It’s not like buying a refrigerator is that consequential,” I’d whined to him. “I mean, it’s not a will-you-marry-me? decision.”

“No. I totally get it,” Zack had answered kindly. “In some cases, the fridge is going to be with you longer than your spouse.”

DECISIONS, DECISIONS

The last time I’d visited Agren, Gebhardt had suggested three refrigerators. The cheapest looked uncannily like my ailing KitchenAid, and Gebhardt predicted it would need service in as little as five years. Feeling old and crochety, I actually caught myself saying that I remembered a time when products were made to last.

The most expensive, a Liebherr, felt as solid and beautiful as a Shaker chair. Because Liebherrs are so reliable, “we deliver a lot of them to the islands,” Gebhardt had said, where getting a repairman to come to one’s home is a major hassle. Reliability with a whiff of Maine island romance? Tempting. But the price was high, and the refrigerator was tiny; the next size up wouldn’t fit in my kitchen.

But the refrigerator in the middle, pricewise and quality-wise, the place I am often most comfortable, was a victim of the dreaded supply chain shortages. It would take three to six months to arrive, Gebhardt had said. When I returned to the store, though, he volunteered to look it up again. “These things change all the time,” he said. Now, it seemed, I could have the refrigerator delivered in less than a month.

I took a deep breath. Would I make a better decision if I waited longer and researched more? I asked myself. I knew I’d only go deeper into the weeds.

My new refrigerator is scheduled to arrive on Sept. 14.

But last night, the shower broke.

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