I bet most of you don’t often look at your refrigerator door before opening it to search for something to eat, am I right? I’m not judging, because I’m the same way most days. That door is an entry point to food, one of life’s few comforts in a sea of days that all feel the same right now. Sometimes we open the door and stare into its depths for minutes on end trying to discover its hidden snacks. But for most of us it is just a vessel within which meals and magic are held and so we pass it without remark in those moments when food is not at the forefront of our minds. It’s just a fixture, an appliance. But not mine.

I couldn’t tell you how long we’ve owned this fridge. My family has lived back in Ontario now for 18 years, after a sojourn in the Great White North and Canada’s East Coast, and so I’d hazard a guess that’s how old this fridge has been around. It’s old enough to vote now. Since 2002 my family base has changed only once and only by about 30 kilometres. But my family unit has spread out so much since then. My Dad moved to Iqaluit, Nunavut, I went away to university, my sister to college, my sister moved to Squamish, British Columbia, my Dad returned from “Up North,” I started working internationally on cruise ships and then moved to Banff, AB before returning to Ontario. Now, that just covers the last 18 years, but our refrigerator door displays much more than that.

The magnets on my refrigerator door are a map of my family’s life.

From the 9-1-1 magnet from North Bay where my parents met and I was born to the reminder cards for upcoming appointments, this door tracks our family across Canada from Ontario to Nova Scotia to the Northwest Territories and then back to Central Ontario over a span of almost 30 years.

There is a Girl Guides magnet from my years advancing from Sparks to Brownies to finally Guides; a Camp Tamakwa calendar magnet from the summers my sister worked away from home; a dolphin magnet from when we jokingly decided my Dad’s Iqaluit apartment should be outfitted with all things dolphin; and a Kate’s Kitchen magnet indicative of the fact that it is indeed Kate’s kitchen.

There are calendar magnets from years past and irrelevant emergency numbers that we will never use again alongside a sun-faded post-it note outlining my family’s crazy meal plan system that we still follow to this day. A is for Chicken, B is for Beef, C is for Pasta, D is for Turkey, E is for Pork, F is for Fish, and G is for Leftovers or ‘Boogie Bears’, which is basically a wild-card night and we can have whatever we want (tonight is G and we are having Taco Salad for those who were interested).

There is a ribbon on the freezer door handle from a bouquet of flowers my mother received on some special occasion. And there’s yellow duct tape holding the fridge door handle in place. The interior fridge light stopped working only this past year and a replacement bulb was tried and failed. But we loathe the idea of replacing this refrigerator altogether because it has served us so well for so many years, despite the fact that it’s probably on its last legs. It very likely lacks the energy efficiency of many newer appliances and it’s only a matter of time before a larger issue emerges. There’s nothing saying we won’t take these magnets from our life and put them on a newer appliance, but this fridge has been around for at least 18 years and that’s a long time.

I know a lot of people have newer and sleeker stainless-steel refrigerator doors and magnets don’t stick to those. I also know that society is leaning towards a more minimalist, less-stuff approach to home design and magnets may represent clutter. By all means, move away from the knick-knack life, but I would encourage you to find something beyond your Instagram timeline to map out your journey, whether it’s magnets or post cards or shot glasses from every new place you go. Because in twenty years, you could be standing in front of your own “refrigerator door” (hopefully not in the middle of a pandemic) and have a nostalgic moment of realization of just how far you’ve traveled in your life.

There is a memory associated with every magnet on that door and all without cracking open a photo album or scrolling through my Instagram uploads, I know exactly where we’ve been. Just by looking at my refrigerator door.