Goodbye to the photos, quotes, poems and adorable children's drawings that over the years had finally combined to obscure every inch of stainless steel.
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This was no time for nostalgia. In the New Year's purge, nothing would be spared.
Not the photo of my brother waving goodbye through a train window to my mother and trying not to cry.
Not that postcard of the Chattahoochee River, despite the jolt I felt when I flipped it over and saw, in handwriting I will never see fresh again, the familiar words, "Love, Mama."
Not the cartoon that shows a jocular boss patting an unhappy minion on the arm and saying, "You're better than ever at something we don't need done anymore."
Auld lang syne, my old fridge friends.
The typical American refrigerator door is a multipurpose object. It's a window to the owner's soul. It's a self-curated life story. It's a mirror. It's a canvas. It's a filing system. It's a nest.
On our refrigerator doors, we display the places we've been and the people we love, we reveal how we see ourselves and want to be seen. We post vital phone numbers. To dismantle this exhibition, built bit by bit, can feel self-annihilating, a trip into amnesia.
Too bad. This was 2012. Time moves forward, not back. It's basic digestive logic: Only by emptying out can you make room for the new.
And so on New Year's Day, I started snatching things off the double doors as if trying to beat a flood.
No, I would not get sidetracked by remembering that I'd once gone hang-gliding in Rio de Janeiro and, equally fun, "butt-danced" in a suburban living room with a 5-year-old niece who is now grown, tattooed and pierced.
I would not linger over that photo of my father in his housepainter's whites standing next to his painter's van, nor would I gaze fondly at photos of friends' weddings and birthday parties.
This was like ripping off a Band-Aid. Liberation stings, but it hurts less if you act fast.
Occasionally, I paused to inspect one of the artifacts, my sticky hands proof that time creates grime.
I'd forgotten this quote, lost under a Geico 800-number magnet, from the writer Evelyn Waugh: "News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read."
And this, ripped from a magazine short story by Alice Munro: "And it was possible, too, that age could become her ally, turning her into somebody she didn't know yet. She has seen that look of old people now and then — clear-sighted but content, on islands of their own making."
I smiled at a magnet given to me a long time ago by someone with whom I had a difficult relationship. "Resolve Conflicts Creatively," it said, then offered a series of numbered steps that began with "Calm Down."
Another magnet, also a gift, offered this counsel from John Steinbeck: "Unless the bastards have the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore them."
I put that one back on the fridge.
But everything else went into a big bowl and then into a drawer, and my denuded refrigerator now gleams with the thing every new year encourages — relaxed space for the mysteries ahead.
mschmich@tribune.com