What Your Refrigerator Says About You (According to the Magnets on It)
If you want to learn something real about a household, skip the living room and go straight to the kitchen. Specifically, go to the fridge. Living rooms get staged for guests. Refrigerators do not. They just accumulate, year after year, whatever the people living there actually care about enough to keep at eye level. I noticed this properly for the first time at my aunt's house, not because her fridge was impressive, but because it was so obviously unedited. A crayon drawing from a kid who is now in college. A magnet from a pharmacy that closed a decade ago. And, dead center, a photo of her and her late husband on a boat somewhere, printed onto a magnet, a little sun faded but still clearly them. Nobody had arranged any of it. It had just built up over time, the way these things do. The Magnet as an Honest Object There is something almost confessional about fridge magnets. Unlike a framed photo, which is chosen deliberately and hung with some ceremony, magnets are added casua...