For a minute, there were only two occupants in the new house: a refrigerator and me.

The refrigerator looked like a bulky brown cabinet—an overgrown vertical box with a dark wood-grain face and two long, skinny, rounded handles. I looked like an eight-year-old boy, which I was at the time, back in the mid-Sixties—an under-grown vertical figure with dark brown hair and a mouth full of crooked teeth. And at that moment—when I pulled on those woody handles and that refrigerator opened in the middle and I saw its interior sparkling in white, blue, and stainless steel—at that moment, I felt a sense of awe and wonder that I had never imagined could be generated by an ordinary household appliance.

Then again, there was nothing ordinary about this appliance.

The refrigerator stood there as a softly humming contradiction to everything I had learned about refrigerators in my short life. The front had the warm look of pecan-stained wood, not cold white metal like all the other refrigerators I had encountered. This one looked like an armoire, dark and stately, commanding respect for itself and the precious treasures it preserved within. Beyond those doors, surely there were chilled tubs of bright yellow butter fresh from the farm, gigantic boxes of thick ice cream in whites and pinks and browns, and gallon upon gallon of the most wonderful liquid on the planet—chocolate milk.

Another peculiarity was that this refrigerator had a freezer on the bottom, not the top, which seemed upside down to me. Even more peculiar was what was down there in the freezer—an icemaker that growled every once in a while and punched quarter-moon cubes over into a deep blue bucket. Until that moment, all the refrigerator ice I had ever seen had come from slender aluminum trays; my mother yanked on their frostbitten handles to break out the boxy cubes, which always left a trail of crystal slivers in the trays and on the counter tops. This new icemaker cranked out cubes that were every bit as cold as that—probably colder—and this ice required no muscle.

But the oddest oddity about this woody-looking, ice-bearing refrigerator was that it was new—my parents’ single splurge as we made the move to this street from our old neighborhood two blocks away.

Well, the house was a splurge, too. All my life, we had lived in a little brick place at the edge of the playground to my elementary school. To this day, I do not know if we rented that little house or owned it, and I don’t remember how many bedrooms it had. All I know now is what I knew then: With four kids, two adults, and one red chow chow, we had outgrown the place, so now we were moving onto this street and into this house with the strange, exceptional, and unbelievably new refrigerator.

The new house was built by a feed-mill owner who bought a big field of weeds, cut a street through it, and went to work putting up ranch houses of brown brick, four bedrooms, and wide carports to one side. Ours had two-and-a-half bathrooms (one-and-a-half more than the old place), a gigantic den covered in white linoleum with brown specks, and a slatted wooden door that swung into the hall. The ceiling had a pebbly sheetrock finish that made it look like the surface of the moon, as I would understand so clearly just three years later when my parents woke me up one July night and I looked at our TV screen and watched Neil Armstrong step onto another world—then, on that historic moment, I fell back to sleep in our big brown recliner. The new house also had a fireplace we did not use and a hidden attic stairway with hinges that creaked when we pulled on a rope and lowered the folding steps. Within a few years, we had that attic packed with all the stuff we no longer needed—the outgrown clothes, the battery-powered plastic Model-T we drove as kids, our aluminum Christmas tree with its spotlighted color wheel that turned everything red, then blue, then gold.

Our yard had no trees. It was just a swath of thick, almost-impossible-to-mow centipede with a chain-link fence that rimmed the back yard like a property marker. The house had three doors, but we always came and went through the one on the side, under the carport; if the front doorbell rang, we knew it was either a salesman or somebody handing out church literature.

Our town had only about 5,000 people and the new house was two miles, tops, from the town square, but these were the Sixties and our new neighborhood was part of suburbia, as far as I knew.

Other families moved in around us, including our best friends from the old neighborhood. As kids, we played tackle football and Kick the Can, and we dug tunnels in a field that the feed-mill owner left vacant when he had sold all the houses he needed to sell and quit building. We kept six-ounce glass bottles of Coca-Cola in the refrigerator, next to the pitcher of sugar-sweetened tea and the quart cartons of chocolate milk.

Time passed.

My parents took up the stiff clover-green carpet in the bedrooms and put down soft royal blue. They covered the broad den floor in beige. I got braces. Sofas came and went. We hung a bench swing under the carport, facing the sunset. The formal drapes came down and country ruffles went up. We graduated from high school.

The woody new refrigerator got some age on it. The icemaker was always temperamental, and since we left it running all the time the motor burned out every now and then. When that happened we called up our friend Jay Cannady, a master of appliance repair, and he would come and get it going in time to ice the glasses for supper. Every time I came home and saw Jay’s white pickup truck parked in our driveway, I knew the icemaker had knocked off again, but now everything was going to be all right.

Time passed, and more time.

In the Eighties, we modernized with a microwave oven, gas logs for the fireplace, pulsating shower heads, and a TV with a bigger screen and a remote control. The brown recliner frayed at the seams, and out it went in favor of new ones covered in bright velour. We got rid of the blue carpet and marveled at the oak floors preserved underneath all these years, the honey finish shining softly against the sun. Grandchildren came, and my parents ripped up the entire back yard and put in a swimming pool and a deck. My father had a stroke and retired from work. Our chow chow died, then the basset hounds we got after her, then the Eskimo Spitz we got after them. My mother grew tired of the old kitchen and had it remodeled. The carpenters cut in a tall spot for the refrigerator, and its old wood grain fit against the new birch cabinets like trees in a forest, only with plumbing.

The Nineties brought us a cordless telephone and a self-propelled lawn mower. In the bedrooms, den, and kitchen, the overhead lights came down and ceiling fans went up. The young neighborhood children grew up and families moved out, and new neighbors with new young children moved in.

Time. Thirty-one years have gone, and the house is—and isn’t—what it used to be. It is still big enough for six, but only two live there now. It isn’t new anymore. The place needs work: The windows are drafty, the trim needs paint, and who knows how much longer that water heater will last up in the attic.

My parents considered selling the house a few times, but their hearts were not in it. They always set the price too high and after a few weeks, when no one had shown up in a Brinks truck, the FOR SALE sign would come down and my parents would stay put, content knowing this was the place they were meant to be.

Then a couple came along a few weeks ago and said they wanted to see the house. The place was not even on the market, but they had heard that it once had been, and they asked to take a look around. They liked it, said it looked like a good place to raise their children. They wanted the house.

So yesterday my parents sold it. They went to the lawyer’s office and signed the papers, then waited there while a courthouse clerk recorded the deed in a new name. It took just a few minutes.

Now they are going to build a new house. It will be smaller than the old one—a house for two, not six. They will build it on our same street, down a few doors from the old place, on a lot in the field where my friends and I laid out battlefields and pummeled each other with clods of dirt when we were children. The new house will be economical, easier to care for. The windows will be new, along with the paint and the water heater and everything else.

Except the refrigerator. My parents will take that with them. The icemaker still breaks down sometimes, so they will give the new address to the new guy who works on it. They found out about him a few years ago, after Jay Cannady got sick with cancer and was gone in just a few months.

This new house will be finished soon. I want to imagine that I will walk into it and all I will see is that old refrigerator standing in the kitchen. I want to imagine that it will be new again and I’ll be a boy again, and I will gaze up at its odd and wonderful wood-grain doors, and I will open them and squint under the bright light and run my fingers across the frosty shelves. I want to imagine drinking down the cold chocolate milk and looking over the glass and seeing stretched out before us the years, all the many years.