Simple Pleasures: Party Ice
And how to survive a pregnant Texas summer
Being pregnant changes your tastes, sharpens them. It was during my first go-round that I really began to notice the taste of ice and water. I know, there should be no taste to taste, but there is. At least, there is for me now.
Back then we lived in the idyllic Texas Hill Country town of Wimberley, famous for its rolling hills, luxurious Cypress trees and corrosively hard water. We used Lime-Away to clean the toilets. The sink fixtures were a constant, crusty battle, the hot water heater fated to an every-five-year purchase.
With my new hormonally-heightened senses of taste and smell, I just couldn’t drink the stuff. Couldn’t even bear to smell it. What previously had been perfectly palatable now reeked of sulfurous rust.
I turned to purified water and found a new love: Party ice.
I don’t think we’d ever bought ice before. My parents aren’t drinkers, and we had ice trays or an ice machine growing up. Plenty of ice.
Being raised in Texas means always, always having ice. We drink our tea and Cokes with glasses packed to the very brim, the beverage almost an afterthought. It still confuses me when someone orders a drink with little or no ice.
But party ice is special — unimpeachably pure, clear, tastes like the freshest, cleanest water, and feels colder to me. Icier.
The elegant tinkling sound as you drink, the way bubbles cling to and then shimmy away from cubes to fizz at the surface. Jewelry in a glass.
My husband can and does chew ice, since he (and now one of our sons) has genetically modified, Kevlar-enhanced robot teeth. (Showoffs.) I can’t even think about trying this — risking thousands of dollars and dozens of weeks in dentistry investment. I envy their reckless abandon.
Funny coincidence, early in our marriage Jeff used to manufacture ice machines, and can still identify the maker by a cube’s shape. There’s pillow ice (kind of a too-big cube to my taste), lenticular ice (lens-shaped and very pleasingly smooth), and nugget ice (known to many of us as Sonic ice, so slushy and luxuriously soft).
In the Star Trek Into Darkness film, a young Jim Kirk gets into a bar fight after slugging whiskey cooled with one perfectly carved, large sphere of ice. I didn’t care so much about the brawl as that ICE. I had to see what that was like, and bought spherical silicon molds at a fancy kitchen store. I think I made maybe three ice balls. They’re so beautiful in the glass, but there’s no traction, no mouthfeel. Just cold lips and a shimmery globe that melts long after the dishes should have been washed.
I buy a ten-pound bag of party ice about once every two weeks now, forgoing frozen fruit and vegetables to save space for it in the freezer. We call it my Ice Baby (go ahead, try not to sing) because when I bring a full bag in from the store it looks like I’m carrying a lumpy child on my hip.
Pregnancy days are long past, but I can still smell dirty ice. That was one downside to Jeff’s ice machine work. He knows and felt compelled to share with me the distasteful horrors an ice machine can harbor when not properly maintained. Let’s just say, clean your ice maker if your drinks taste funny. Or just go out and adopt an Ice Baby habit of your own.
I’d love to hear about the simple pleasures that keep you happy day to day. Write in the comments here or you can email me at [email protected]. Thank you!
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