Billboards

THE other morning we turned from arms control, the Middle East, and other weighty foreign-policy issues to ponder a domestic question instead: refrigerator doors. The modern American fridge door is both a medium of communications and a forum for individual expression. With its vast eye-level blank space and its irresistible appeal to magnets, it all but cries out to be adorned with the kids' art, with photos, with postcards from traveling friends, to say nothing of more utilitarian items such as Little League schedules and shopping lists. Then there are, alas, those stickers that stick on but never quite peel off again, and magnets, themselves an art form - of sorts.

How, one wonders, did households communicate before fridge doors? Where, for instance, did our Pilgrim foreparents leave their little notes to one another, ``Venison on the spit. Will be home right after musket practice - XOX''?