The Lowest Shelf

There is hope at the bottom of my fridge.

See that bottle at the bottom of this refrigerator? Not the mostly-finished Montbazillac resting perilously close to the raw chicken thighs. The other one. The one beneath the taramosalata. The one with the white foil wrapper. It’s a bottle of champagne, but I’m sure you already knew that. My readers are nothing if not sophisticated.

For years I’ve kept a decent bottle of bubbly in this precise location, chilled and at the ready in case something comes up that merits celebration. There hasn’t been much to celebrate around here in the past couple of years, so the last bottle to rest on that lowest shelf was commandeered for its secondary purpose: TO BE OPENED IN CASE OF EMERGENCY.

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