Last summer, when visiting my mother, we discovered that all the ice from her refrigerator seemed to be made of epsom salt. She had gotten used to this, living her life with the understanding that during hotter months of the year all sodas and juices would taste like they were mixed with a spicy turkey gravy, but we immediately discarded all her old ice trays and sent her several replacements.
I never realized that there were so many new variations on the idea of an ice cube tray. My grandparents had fancy metal trays, requiring herculean strength to pull a frozen lever and crack apart individual pieces. We’d always had blue stackable trays made of a material that eventually became as brittle as potato chips. Now there was an endless selection online, including “perma-ice”: little plastic cubes filled with water that one could freeze, use, and then freeze again. From the few we ordered my mother was able to choose the one she liked the best, but we suspected that my mother was still not in possession of the best ice cube tray in the world.
Yesterday the New York Times published its list of the best ice cube trays in the world. https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/the-best-ice-cube-tray/ The winner was surprisingly traditional, a plastic durable number guaranteed not to crack under repeated use with a sliding lid for easy stacking and prevention of the bad tastes attributed to “freezer burn”.
I immediately sent one to my mother, and got one for us as well, because it’s that time of year where there don’t seem to be enough ice trays.
I appreciate the national holiday, but it isn’t quite summer yet: kids still in school, a lot of rain in the forecast, but we’re getting close. When it is hot, it’s really hot. Iced coffee is beginning to sound like a good idea. The grocery store has a sale on those frozen juice popsicles in the long plastic sleeves. The air conditioning just kicked on at work, but we’re still getting good use out of our office sweaters because they haven’t adjusted it yet.
And back at home, we just keep running out of ice. We currently have four trays that make little ice squares and one that makes very large ones. Iced coffee in the morning is half a tray. We mostly drink water and my daughter isn’t really an ice person, so maybe at a meal we’ll use a tray or so, which is fine during the week, but on weekends we go through them quicker. It’s getting a little tense.
Again, it isn’t quite summer …we’re not using the snow cone machine that I bought at the Bed Bath and Beyond closing sale yet, and we have some metal insulated drinkware (not the popular ones) so drinks stay colder for longer. Still, in the last few weeks I’ve repeatedly had to go to the back of the freezer for the Last Ice Tray.
Because all of the others are empty. Cold as can be, but dry as the arctic ice shelf itself.
Our personal supply of frozen water is easily renewable, as the faucet is only six feet from the refrigerator. But unlike the mindless tasks of taking out the trash or changing a bathroom tissue roll, filling the ice cube trays is a delicate zen exercise.
the tray rests uncomfortably on the hands
cold permeates the fingers
water slowly fills the trays as one decides whether to fill vertically or horizontally, tips left and then right
the level of each well is considered individually, and then as a community
then begins the forcibly slow aqua-monk contemplative path back to the freezer
water must not spill
as the tray is replaced in the freezer with a light-as-a-feather touch
Who has time for all of that?
Our lives move so fast, and there’s nothing else in the house we have to wait for anymore. It used to be that a television took a while to warm up – same with the car, or the water in the shower, but now technology has created little need for heat related patience. Even my teapot boils within three minutes. I guess it’s easy to make things hot…
…but ice still takes time, it cannot be rushed; even in its basest form it is somewhat artisanal. It is made not merely of water, but of time itself.
And so I have embraced the ten seconds it takes to transport water-filled ice trays from the kitchen sink to the freezer as a daily meditation. In part, to find more opportunities to ground and center myself in this confusing and dynamic world, but also because nobody else likes to fill the ice trays.
On my daily journey, I mostly think about ice.
— Currently the world’s largest iceberg is A23a, a frozen sheet nearly 1500 square miles wide weighing half a trillion tons, double the size of Los Angeles and five times that of New York City.
Step,
— How lucky is it that Steve Rogers was chosen to be Captain America? If you just chose a random guy from 1945 and woke him up again in 2011, I think he’d have a harder time adjusting. Of course, Steve is from Brooklyn.
step,
— When most kids were learning how to play basketball, our grade school taught us to ice skate, which I didn’t fully appreciate at the time but should have kept up with as there are very few African American figure skaters and I might have scored a Wheaties™ box. #DebiThomas
step,
— Vanilla Ice, the performer, is on tour this summer. His real name is Matthew Van Winkle. I had always assumed that Van Winkle was a made up name from Washington Irving’s story, but now I guess there’s a family of Cinderellas out there.
and I gently close the freezer door.
How this humble task will be appreciated on many blazing hot afternoons in the near future! And today, lo, the best ice tray in the world will arrive at our door… who knows what magic it will create? of what frosty miracles it is capable? how much colder our cold water can be? Also, I should have checked how big it is, because it’s probably not going to fit in our freezer with all those popsicles in there.
A Nice Cold Glass Of Anything.