I can remember standing in my great-grandmother’s kitchen and looking into her ice box. Yes, she had an old-fashioned ice box, complete with regular deliveries from the iceman. The Iceman continued to “cometh” into many homes well into the 1960’s when electric refrigerators and freezers finally made the ice box and its daily deliveryman obsolete.
My great-grandmother’s ice box was a beautiful piece of furniture. It was lined with metal throughout the inside of its thick walls. The main thing I remember coming out of the icebox was the glass milk bottle, complete with little cardboard cover over its opening. My great-grandfather used to take swigs directly from the milk bottle when his wife was out of the room, winking at me to show he trusted me to keep his “secret” from my great-grandma.
At my other grandparents’ house, they had a large deep freeze in the dark recesses of the back of their basement. The kitchen refrigerator only had a tiny freezer compartment, just large enough for holding two metal trays of ice cubes. Anything else to be kept frozen was kept in the deep freeze.
Certain that the dark basement with its gigantic noisy freezer was haunted, I was always terrified to be sent to the deep freeze to retrieve the box of ice cream. Even though being sent to get the treat meant I could have my choice of flavors, it was still my least favorite duty when visiting Grandma. I don’t think anyone in the family ever fully understood I was truly terrified of the basement. Especially of the freezer.
Oh, the imagination of childhood. It isn’t all rainbows and fairies. Sometimes it consists of haunted freezers and demons hiding in dark corners. I was so excited when Grandma finally bought a new refrigerator for the kitchen that had enough space to store the ice cream. No more trips alone down the steep stairway into the belly of the house’s basement. This was one time when the siren call of new-and-better Consumer Culture was a good thing, at least to my tiny childhood self.
Back at my house, my parents were young and somewhat “hip” and usually the first on our street to get the latest and greatest appliances. For example, we were the first house on the block to have color television. We were also the first to have a full-size refrigerator/freezer.
My clearest memory of our freezer was my mom making frozen treats from orange juice or lemonade. Whenever the neighborhood kids and I heard the tell-tale music of the ice cream truck, I was told by my mom that it was the signal for me to come in the house and get one of Mom’s homemade popsicles. At the time, I didn’t realize it was my mom’s way of saving money. It was much cheaper to make frozen treats with juice than to purchase the individual ice pops each day from the ice cream truck. My friends were jealous. Mom’s juice pops were better than any blue or purple freezer-burned offering from the truck. It wasn’t long before my mom had a line of children at the backdoor asking if they could give her their ice cream money for a juice popsicle. She let them keep their change and gave out popsicles freely.
My mom’s nickname in the neighborhood became The Popsicle Lady. I miss the Popsicle Lady.
A Frugal Simple Life 