This New Year’s Cold Comfort

There is a Japanese custom close to my heart. It’s called o-souji. It’s the process of cleaning and organizing your home and office during the last week of the year, while at the same time giving thanks to the previous one. For me, it’s less about organizing and more about starting the year with a clean slate. A workspace muddled and messy will only stand in your way of New Year’s resolutions.

With o-souji in mind, I’ve been tweaking areas of my parents’ home on Cape Cod this past week, however there was one area I wasn’t planning on attacking.

“Why is the ice cream soft?” My dad said removing it from the freezer. I reopened the freezer door and felt a container of soup. It was soup. We realized the fridge was on the fritz. What to do? We decided to put all the food in our backup fridge: the garage. Mom called Sears, Dad removed the contents, and I put “salvageables” into the 400-square-foot 9-degree Fahrenheit fridge.

Next I grabbed a roll of paper towels, some cleaner and got down on my knees and wiped up the puddle of purple liquid on the bottom of the freezer, a mixture of melted ice and frozen berries. O-souji? More like o-save-us.

Our menu plan is now simple: since the weather is predicted to remain around zero for the next straight week on Cape Cod, we’ve decided to either select our meals from the garage menu or eat out a lot in Japanese restaurants.

Whether you want to follow an ancient custom or just want a neat environment, one thing is for sure: when your living space is clean and orderly, your disposition has no choice but to be boosted, which is a great way to approach the new year.

Happy 2018!