Every couple of years, I open the door of my refrigerator and think, ‘this is a toxic waste dump- somebody needs to clean this out.’

And since one of the basic rules of being married is, if you find the mess, you clean the mess, it fell on me.

This rule applies to dirty diapers, dog vomit, and apparently all the expired stuff in the refrigerator.

How did I know this? Well, as I stood in front of the open door, my lovely wife walked by and said, “somebody should clean that out.”

Around my house, the word ‘somebody’ always means me.

So, after putting it off as long as I could and hiding from my wife for the last three days, I decided to tackle the job.

The first thing I noticed was the sheer number of jellies and jams we owned. It was like Smucker’s was using our refrigerator for additional warehouse space.

Grape, cherry, blackberry, boysenberry, apple, muscadine. If it could be squeezed or mashed, we had a jelly or jam made from it.

We even had a jar of tomato jam. What the heck do you even put that on? Unicorn meat?

I made some tough choices.

Everything with mold on top was tossed. Everything else went back into the fridge.

Take that, Smucker’s.

Then I tackled the sauces.

I don’t want to brag, but I have more sauces than Publix. Not the store. The chain.

It is a problem for me, I will admit. If we go into a store that sells sauces, I always have to get a bottle or three.

We have two refrigerators that have a combined total of 14 shelves. Thirteen of them are filled with sauces.

This would be a hard one. Did I really want to throw out the bottle of oyster sauce I bought six years ago at that truck stop in Kentucky? Or the twelve bottles of hot sauce we purchased nine years ago from that guy on the beach in Belize?

I figured the only way to decide would be to unscrew the caps and take a big swallow of each.

I threw away 16 bottles of sauce. I made a lot of space but now can’t see out of my left eye.

Then came the cheeses. My rule here was, if it’s moldy, it goes. But if it had a few green spots, I just sliced that off and gave it to the dogs.

One of them is now walking into walls and trying to eat her own tail.

And since there’s only two of us in the house now, we tend to have lots of leftovers. We always have great intentions of eating them, but instead, they pile up like cars on the freeway during a heavy fog.

This becomes a guessing game

Ten points if I’m right. Salmonella if I’m wrong.

I popped the lid on the first one. It was either meatloaf or lasagna. It was hard to tell under that thick coat of green fuzz so I held it up to my wife’s face for a second opinion.

She gagged and called me a very ugly word. Ten points.

In the back, I found a container of leftover chicken piccata, my wife’s favorite. I figured it I warmed it up and fed it to her, she’d never have to worry about antibiotics again.

And then I dug through our produce drawer.

Every time we go shopping, I buy a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables, promising myself that I was going to start eating better.

But I don’t.

I found a bag of kale bought back in December. I wasn’t surprised it was still in there. Nobody likes kale.

And under that was some baby Bok choy. I planned to use it to do some of that fancy Takoyuki stuff like they do at Benihana’s. I might even do that thing where they make a volcano out of onion rings. That would impress my wife.

But I put my fancy spatula away. The Bok choy had somehow magically turned into green Jello.

After an hour, our refrigerator was clean enough to eat on- our out off- and I promised myself I would never let it get…

Ooo… a bottle of pickles I bought when Reagan was still president.

I’m keeping that.