Once Upon a Freezer

So, who does a blog post on a freezer? me
And who actually has a story behind their freezer? me
And who gets teary eyed when the freezer is taken away by a friend to its new home and has to be consoled by her 10 year old? me

The story begins over 13 years ago.  
Anyone who has read my blog over the last few years knows that we lost a full term baby boy back in March of 2000.  The story of Taylor is written in a previous blog post, so I won't go into that too much now.  But after having a stillborn son, our friends, family and church really rose to help.  One way was providing food and meals for our family of 6 at that time.  We received so many meals that we had no place to put all the food and our appetites weren't that great at the moment anyway.  My darling husband went with a family member over to Home Depot and quickly bought us a deep freezer.  It was rapidly filled.  That freezer lasted us well for 13 years and subsequently was filled with meals and treats through 6 pregnancies, a few miscarriages and the death of my father.  It was a great freezer, very well loved but I must admit not taken care of very well.  I think we only defrosted it and totally cleaned it out twice and that was due to a move and a hurricane.  Anyway, as you can tell from the picture below, it looks pretty bad.  But it still worked and I have a lovely friend that needed a freezer with her 3 children and we were in the market for a cow; not a live cow, but 1/4 of a local, grass fed, organic, pastured raised cow.  We ordered our cow with a group of friends and since this current freezer could in no way hold the cow plus all the usual things in our freezer, I got a new freezer for my birthday!  It holds almost double and is much easier to organize and retrieve things from.  Yes, this mom of many did not want anything else for my birthday but a new deep freezer.  I know many of you moms would want that too, right?  And the day before we drove out to the country to pick up our cow, we went strawberry picking and picked 30 pounds of berries!  So now my new freezer is full of 100 pounds of beef (just about every cut you can imagine) and strawberries, plus a few other things : )

Now the day before the new freezer was arriving and the old one going to our friends, we had to clean out the old freezer.  You would not believe some of the things we found.  Here is a partial list and I promise that I am not making any of this up.

4 bags of frozen shrimp
3 plastic containers of food that I have no idea what they were.
20 various Popsicles and Italian ices buried in mounds of ice.
1 dead mouse.
2 dead skinned squirrels in Ziploc bags (I had no idea my boys had put these last things in there!)
1 dead raccoon 

Here is a picture of the clean out.....lol

So, some tears were shed by me when the old freezer left.  I guess it was just the memories and remembering the time it was purchased.  God provides just what we need when we need it.  I was consoled by my 10 year old who looked at me and said, "At least it's going to our friends and not the dump!"  (Out of the mouth of babes.)  And even though my friend said it looked like it got run over or something, she is putting it to good use.  I wonder if she has any dead rodents in it yet : )

The new freezer, stuffed with grass fed, healthy beef.  Hopefully, this will last a year.