The Other Most Wonderful Time of the Year

 I use ice in my drinks. Like, a lot of ice. And by drinks I mean mainly water, which is what I drink most of the time. I think it was after my pregnancies that water that was anything less than glacial became revolting. 

 

Having a fridge with an ice maker always seemed impossibly luxurious and decadent. Then at some point I read or heard that they tend to break down and cause problems, so I put it out of my mind entirely. We used ice cube trays like normal people, except unlike normal people I tended to go through two trays of ice a day, between my home water glasses and my work water bottles, and cracking the ice cubes out of the trays was really hard on my hands, which pregnancy had done a number on.

 

When we decided on our new fridge I didn't even realize at first that it came with an ice maker - not the one on the front of the door, but one inside that filled up a bin. Since it was a feature of most of the fridges, I just went with it and felt like I had won a magical lottery. I was giddy with ice. I was Elsa in her frozen kingdom, but less sad and isolated (sometimes). I strew ice like diamonds in my path. Every drink was arctic. 

 

Then the inevitable happened. The fridge stopped making that beautiful clunking noise that meant it was birthing little cubes of joy. The ice level in the bin went down, down, down, until it was empty. We tried a few things to fix it. We found out that it would be really expensive to get someone else to fix it. I resigned myself to going back to ice cube trays like a chump. 

 

A few months later there was a tornado nearby that knocked our power out for sixty hours. We coped well enough. Half a day after the power came back on, my husband came upstairs bearing an oblong sliver of ice like the crown jewels. We were back, baby! For a while, anyway. When it packed up again, I tried defrosting the fridge for a day, but it didn't work. It is, of course, the first worldiest of all first world problems, so I shrugged and resumed the regular routine. 

 

The next Christmas, Matt bought me an ice maker. It lived downstairs in the laundry room, and didn't make a ton of ice at a time, and the ice came out wet, so I would go down, take out the ice and store it in the chest freezer, bring up the frozen chunk ice that was currently in the chest freezer, smash it with a meat tenderizer, and put it in the upstairs freezer. It was fine - better than cracking ice cube trays. 

 

We have theorized that in the winter when everything is cold, somehow the water line freezes, and the fridge can't make ice. But then in the spring, like the swallows returning to Capistrano, my ice comes back, a precious gift that is perhaps more meaningful because of its impermanence.