1968. I was 12 years old. Bob Gibson threw 13 complete game shutouts for the St. Louis Cardinals that year. Catfish Hunter threw a perfect 9 inning game for the Oakland A’s. All 27 batters retired in order.

Nobody pitches like that anymore. But I thought it worth mentioning in light of the Brewers historic World Series win last night.

1968 was also the year of the freezer war at my house over one small container of shaved coconut.

Background first.

The small porch on the back of our house was more than just a buffer between the kitchen and the backyard. It was the early equivalent of the modern day utility room. Our washer and dryer were on that porch. A white Frigidaire with a chrome pull handle sat next to the dryer. It was the backup fridge for fresh vegetables and the fish that we caught out of the pond.

A narrow path down the middle connected the kitchen door to the screened door, and to the right of that path sat a chest freezer the size of a small elephant. A child’s chair stood by the back door where dad kept his work boots. There was one coat hook underneath the one wall-mounted light bulb. Dad’s coat and the fly swatter hung there.

The floor was concrete and the waist-high walls were brick. Above the walls was a wooden frame with screen wire. The porch was enclosed but not from the weather. Hot as heck in the summer and cold as a penguin’s you-know-what in the winter. On extreme nights, Dad had to drain the water from the pump on the washing machine to keep it from freezing.

That’s the setting for this story.

I don’t really remember how often, but about every three or four years Mama would get in the mood to clean out the old chest freezer. If you’ve ever owned one you know difficult it is to dig through the contents and how easy it is to lose something down in the bottom. Bags and bags of frozen butter beans, corn, okra, round steaks, chopped steaks, venison, hamburger, panfish, catfish, peaches, blackberries, and one container of shaved coconut.

If it was something to eat, Mama believed in putting up and saving everything she could. She’d sooner have to stay up all night working in the kitchen than let food go to waste.

The freezer would start out neat and organized. Then the garden would come in. We’d put up fish in the summer. Bird hunting and rabbit hunting came in the fall, followed by slaughtering a cow when it got cold enough. All of it went into the chest freezer.

Over time, the freezer would fill up. If you wanted something you had to dig for it.

“Where’d I put those peaches from last summer?” Mama would ask.

“Try digging around on the right side,” Dad would suggest.

After two or three years of filling and emptying and digging around, whatever semblance of order which may have existed at one time, turned into a jigsaw puzzle that no one could unravel. And since the old freezer never sealed up like it should have, there would be about a 3 inch thick coat of ice on the inside walls. You’d find a package of round steak and have to get a hammer and chisel to get it out.

Which is why every few years Mama would announce, “I’m gonna clean out that freezer tomorrow.”

I would help by dropping whatever she handed me into a feed bucket. Some of the items were so freezer burned that we couldn’t tell what it was. It might be corn. It might be squash. We couldn’t be sure. But if Mama said it was no good, we threw it away.

The one thing that she would never throw away was her container of shaved coconut. I don’t remember where she got it. I know she used it when she made German chocolate and coconut cakes, and sometimes when she made ambrosia during the holidays.

“Why don’t you throw that thing away?” Dad would ask. “It can’t be good anymore.”

He claimed that she had had it since they’d been married. She swore it wasn’t that old, it was still good, and that she wasn’t about to get rid of it. He threatened to toss it when she wasn’t looking.

She said, “John Chappell, don’t you touch my coconut.”

It was a long lasting battle between those two. I think it was in the 1980s, I got a letter from Dad, back when people still did that sort of thing. He talked about the cows and what they were picking from the garden. A little bit of news about the neighbors. How dry the pastures were getting. Then near the end…

“We cleaned out the freezer the other day. Your mama still won’t let me throw out her coconut.”

I thought about all of this the other day when my friend, Sara, commented about me throwing out all of the outdated cake mixes that I had in my pantry. She told me, “Next time you buy some, put the box in the freezer. It’ll keep longer.”

I don’t know about these things. And the truth is, I’m don’t spend a whole lot of time worrying about it. There are only two expiration dates that I really pay any attention to. One is on the milk jug, and the other is on the meat packages. Most anything else I figure it’s still good and probably won’t make me sick.

This is an ongoing debate with Marion. She is often aghast at the way in which I manage my pantry and freezer. Too many expired items.

My argument is that the stamp doesn’t really say “expiration”, it says, “best if used by”. It’s kind of a suggested date that comes from a management team that doesn’t want to get sued. That box of crackers is probably okay if it’s been sealed up and it’s not years past the date.

She just finished this week cleaning out both of her freezers. She threw out anything marked 2024. She kept a few 2025 items, though not for herself but to give away to friends or family. She only retained the bags marked 2026.

For the sake of clarity, I should point out that 2026 is the current year. There ain’t nothing old in her freezer.

On the other hand, like my mama, I throw out the stuff I can no longer identify. If it’s that freezer burned, it has to go. I have frozen ham and cheese breakfast croissants in my freezer right now that fit that description. I also had some of those little packs of Swiss Miss Hot Chocolate mix, circa 2015. I didn’t know I had them until after Marion told me that she had thrown them out.

One last note. After my folks passed away, my sister and I cleaned out the freezer on their back porch. We couldn’t find the coconut. I’m not sure whether Dad won the battle or Mama finally used it all up.

When I expire, I’ll ask them.