There was a time when people relied on the town square. They may have called it the village green or the market square or the piazza. They would have come to exchange information or to gather the news of the day, and public notices would have been posted and important dates would have been pinned to the pole or kiosk or shelter in the square. The town square was the engine of commerce and served as a communications hub long before anyone had the notion of anything more complex than a bulletin board.

But people don’t rely on the town square anymore, it’s been replaced by lots of things and in most American homes it’s been upstaged with a more modern centralized information center … it’s called the refrigerator.

No one puts their cute little family pictures in a photo album anymore, nobody frames the snapshots of all those homely nieces and nephews, they put ’em on the refrigerator. All of those important notices and “save the dates” and “notices to appear” don’t get diligently filed in a cabinet or a bureau, they get stuck to the Frigidaire. Keepsakes and trinkets and mementos don’t get placed on the mantle or some place of honor in the dining room, no, they all become somehow affixed to the frig.

The place where you keep last month’s leftovers, that whirring rectangle where vegetables go to become fossilized has turned into the world’s most expensive cork bulletin board.

Do you know what brand your frig is? Do you know what color it is? I don’t. There’s so much crap plastered all over it that there’s really not a spot big enough to indicate what color it might be.

Did you take all the shit off of your old refrigerator and put it in a safe pile so that as soon as the new one arrived you could quickly cover it with all those random things? Damn, right you did!

I have my daughter’s second-grade report card on my refrigerator, which is sweet and endearing until you realize she’s now twenty-eight. I have every thank-you card the family has received since 1997 on the refrigerator, all pinned to the freezer door with one of over 200 magnets.

The magnets are my favorite part of our electric bulletin board, but most of them aren’t strong enough to hold the item we’re looking to magnetize. We seem to have a lot of heavy items that for some reason need to become part of the refrigerator. How many magnets does it take to make the phonebook stick to the refrigerator? I know one thing, the amount of family budget dollars allocated to magnet acquisition has gone way, way up.

On our refrigerator, we have an emergency contact card that dates back to before there was such a thing as “911.” Hey, the house is on fire, what’s the number for the fire department? I don’t know, look on the frig. The kitchen is the room that’s burning!

If you’re like most people you have to start concocting creative ways to find a space for all the shit you wanna put on the frig. Soon you’re buying magnets the size of bricks and using special computer software to geometrically determine the available space.

I have a middle school lunch menu on my refrigerator. None of the kids live at home anymore but it’s reassuring to know that on Thursdays back in 2010 you could get both mac & cheese and chicken fingers.

The refrigerator is the place for those household bills you never have any intention of paying. Have you ever looked high and low at your house for a simple notepad? Check the frig. Everything that used to go in a drawer now gets taped to the refrigerator … calendars, airline tickets, bottle opener, dental appointment cards.

Everything a little kid ever made using popsicle sticks or macaroni or string or their handprint or feathers, yep, it’s right there somewhere on the refrigerator.

At our house, the available frig real estate doesn’t just consist of the front of the frig or the parts of it that happen to be at eye-level, nope, we use all four sides. There’s a magnetic card for the refrigerator repair guy that you could literally tap with your foot. Where’s that notice we got saying they were gonna shut-off our water? Check the frig. I did, it’s not there. Did you look inside?

I know that we have pictures on our refrigerator of people that we don’t know, people that we are in no way related to. You can’t open or shut it without something falling off from the outside. The thing is so cluttered, so well disguised that visitors often walk right past it. Hey, don’t you guys have a frig?

There’s rarely anything delicious in my refrigerator, but at least the outside’s interesting and I know exactly where to go when I need to find my birth certificate or when I want to look at pictures of strangers.

Photo credit: Mike Burns on Best Running / CC BY-SA