There was no doubt about it: the freezer had died. I peered in at all the food and wondered what in the world we were going to do with it. There were no longer such things as rental lockers; the low-cost efficient home freezers available now had closed that small industry. Well, our freezer certainly was no longer efficient. I closed the door and surveyed the small puddles of melted ice already in evidence on the floor. If we kept the door tightly shut, most things would stay frozen for several days. I just had to get busy doing something . . . and FAST!

     It was only the first week in May, but I hauled out all the canning kettles and jars and took stock. I'd need lids and sugar and supplies for brine and mustard and stuff to make quantities of barbecue sauce. I wrote out my shopping list and headed to the store. Maybe, if I hurried, I could still get something done tonight. I'd be burning the mid-night oil for days until we couldn't salvage anything more.

     For the rest of the week I'd get home from work and jump right into a preserving mode. I made jam out of the strawberries and the rest of the fruits. We lost not one package. I bought a small smoker on my way home from work on the second day. I filled a crock with thawed smelt and brine for smoking. I cooked up a huge batch of barbecue sauce and we started canning the remaining smelt in that and in mustard like sardines. I tried canning some of the corn but it tasted awful. We thawed out the rest of it and fed it to the two calves fattening up in the barnyard. They loved it.

     The weekend became a canning marathon for my husband and me. To our own chagrin, we chopped up venison and elk steaks and roasts and canned them for stew meat. We boiled and boned chickens, canning both meat and broth. We roasted a turkey and snacked continuously, having no time to prepare meals.

     In fact, we salvaged just about everything in that freezer-turned-hot-box. We got right down to the large bags of trout we had frozen in water. They were now unfrozen in water. They were not suitable for either canning or smoking and, if memory served us correctly, would be pretty "ripe" soon. We certainly wouldn't be able to put them in the garbage can to sit for a week. We fell into bed exhausted, hoping for some plan of action to present itself. During the night I had an inspiration; it was a stroke of genius!

     At work on Monday, I made arrangements to take Tuesday morning off and on my way home I stopped at the garden center to buy an array of petunias. I hadn't told Ken of my plan, I wanted to surprise him. The next morning, as soon as he left for work, I emptied trout into a bucket and got my shovel and the petunias. I carefully dug evenly spaced holes surrounding our front porch and along the driveway out to the road. Next, I gently laid one trout in the bottom of each hole, covered it with dirt and added a petunia, filling in around the flowers and stamping down the loose soil. Like the Indians who had inhabited this land generations earlier, I would let the fish fertilize our beautiful plants and they would become full and lush. I cleaned up and headed off to work feeling smug. Ken would be so proud of me.

     That evening, arriving home from work, I was horrified at the sight of what had previously (just that morning, in fact) been my front yard. It looked like someone had maliciously taken a backhoe to it. There were giant holes and mounds of dirt surrounding the house and all along the driveway. There were pieces of petunias covering the entire yard. I couldn't believe it. Who had done such a horrible thing? I was still surveying the damage in utter dismay when Ken arrived from a long day at work. He climbed out of his pickup and joined me in the center of the destruction.

     "What in the world happened here?" he demanded.

     "I don't know," I answered, still in a stunned state, "I just planted petunias this morning as a surprise for you. Why would anyone do this?"

     "What's that smell?" Ken turned to me as if I knew more than I was telling him.

     "Well, it could be the trout," I admitted, "I planted them under the flowers as fertilizer. I thought you'd be glad they weren't wasted after all."

     "You mean you did this on purpose?" his shocked tone let me know in no uncertain terms that this was definitely my fault. "Didn't you know that every dog in the neighborhood would hot-foot it over here as soon as they got wind of those stinking fish?"

     "But they were in the ground," I defended myself. Tears beginning to slowly wind their way down my cheeks. "I buried them deep."

     "Welcome to the world of reality." Ken put his arm around my shoulders and softened his tone. "Dogs have great noses. I bet they could smell those fish for a mile. Even underground."

     Late that night, when we had finally cleaned up the last of the disaster, filling in holes and throwing bits of fish and flowers into the field, I was still trying to justify my plan. "I really thought it would be a good idea," I sniffed as we snuggled on the couch, exhausted. "All the fertilizer I buy for the plants says its from fish."

     "Well," Ken countered, "you may have been right about one thing. I'd say the entire project ended up being a very large pile of fertilizer!"