A terrible tragedy befell me the other day. I was forced to defrost my frost-free refrigerator — more accurately, the frosted-over freezer of my frost-free refrigerator.

I’d noticed a thickening layer of rime on the plastic walls of said freezer whenever I opened the door and pulled something out. Being a resourceful (and basically lazy) person, I opted to using a butter knife to clean out the little vents where the cold air comes out.

That worked until last Saturday.

I woke as usual, made my way downstairs and realized there was a jet idling in my kitchen. A closer investigation determined that it wasn’t an airplane readying for take-off but my refrigerator.

My first instinct was to raise my face to the heavens and cry, “Why me? Why now? I can’t afford a new refrigerator!”

My second, and better instinct, was to open the freezer door to see if I could figure out what was wrong.

A shuffling of frozen foods and a few tentative pokes of the forementioned butter knife led to a discovery that the fan was surrounded by ice, hence the horrendous sound.

I shuffled the various packages of food into coolers and the refrigerator proper and resigned myself to an old-fashioned defrost session. Problem is, I’ve been having some problems with my hands and arms and knew probing at the ice with a plastic spatula — my normal practice in situations like this — would lead to dreadful pain.

These are the times when I miss Hubby most. If he’d still been with me, I would have turned the situation over to him, sashayed off to do some Christmas shopping and come home to a clean, dry, refilled freezer.

Alas, I was left to my own devices. However, as I said earlier, I am resourceful. I also knew the chances of the cooler keeping that food frozen until the ice thawed naturally were nil. So I hot-footed it upstairs and grabbed the hand-held hair dryer.

Spatula in one hand, hair dryer in the other, I melted and carefully scraped until the glacier became a thin glass of ice. I took a break to rest my hands and let the hair dryer cool off, then set about converting the icy sheet into water.

Ten minutes, a half-roll of paper towels and one bent spatula later, I was done. I slipped the plastic plug I’d found underneath a stack of frozen chicken parts into the hole it would fit and, with a sense of foreboding, plugged the refrigerator back in.

I was rewarded with a pleasant hum, rather like a flock of bumblebees meandering across a summer meadow.

Giddy with relief, I began piling the frozen food back into the freezer. And as I did so, I made some interesting discoveries.

Like the fact that I had six — count them, six — packages of flour tortillas in the freezer. And while I’m good about freezing leftovers, I’m really bad about putting on dates. The frozen bean soup went bye-bye, since I can’t remember having made bean soup in at least a year.

I also discovered a package of chicken prettles (a unique up-home treat) that my mother had sent home with me, a delightful surprise that became my supper that night.

And I realized that when my daddy told me that self-reliance was always rewarded, he didn’t add that the reward was a favorite comfort food.

CATHIE SHAFFER can be reached at cathieshaffer@zoominternet.net