Foodstuff Friday: Ice (we perish more than twice)

The carbon footprint of a New Yorker is dainty. City dwellers in general have small carbon footprints, a result of a good rapid transit system serving the many; my carbon footprint is, like, five narrow. Kids' sized.

Having thus appeased my conscience I state my one consumer fantasy: A refrigerator with an ice maker--cubes and crushed. Hey, chill.
As an L.A. kid I performed the usual experiments, pouring lemonade and soda into ice cube trays (the plastic kind wrung like wash cloths and the more complicated two-piece metal trays that look like distant cousins of a male and female triffid). There were also ice cubes shaped, like jello, by the container. 
It might be ice's transient resilience that is so attractive. Ice is a role model. It's so much itself, being cold, until it's not. Ice is transparent and lacking guile until it makes your teeth chatter as if trained by the Gestapo or Three Stooges. It's cloudy and Mata Hara-like, yet comforts with its little plop into the glass, a plop promising refreshment, not dissolution of stomach acid. And there's that, I am slush, I am not water hauteur.  In all states it's bitable, crunchable, a punching bag for the psyche to use.

I am an ice whisperer. Hear me, ice tongues, ice caps, icebergs.

My refrigerator is old enough to grow its own ice. Defrosting is needed monthly; performed at least (the very least) twice a year. Rather than tax the aged compartment I buy ice by the bag, every cube, like every snowflake, similar to others and yet distinct. 

Of course there's Fire and Ice by Robert Frost. I didn't know it in high school, but we perish daily and regenerate as often.  And as we spring to life, the sweet icy rattle of cubes is, well, music to our ears.