The Ice Man Cometh by Karl

It's amazing how the most mi-nute happening can trigger a memory recall of something that happened eons ago.
I was sitting on my swing on a hot afternoon sipping down my last drop of ice tea and as I swirled the remaining ice around I remembered happy events that happened when I was 4 or 5 years old. We had no refrigerator so we had to buy ice almost daily to put into our "antique" ice-box and I was giving the job at times to wait out by the road to tell the iceman how much we wanted. Sometimes it would be a nickels worth or a dimes worth and for those rare occasions we were cranking ice cream it would be a whole quarters worth..Yum Yum.. After I told him our order he would use an ice pick to stab along the measured line to cut the desired amount and almost always a few chunks would fall into the back of his truck and I, with friends at times, would hop onto the bumper and try to get the largest piece. We would run off licking it while swapping it hand to hand and in the process making mud because we always had dirty hands from playing but we all survived so I guess a little dirt doesn't hurt. That ice meant as much to me then as the finest meal today since we were dirt poor and about the only money we could "earn" would be to find a drink bottle and get the 2 cent deposit. That bought a big cookie and a piece of candy...Again yum yum. We would take part of the 25 cent ice and put it in a burlap bag and use something heavy to bang it until it was small enough to stuff into the wooden hand-cranked freezer beside the gallon metal container that contained the mix and start cranking while adding salt to the ice. The cranking process wore out at least 3 of us kids and there was 5 of us total and when it got too hard to crank Dad would pour more salt on the ice and cover it with the bruised burlap bag to freeze harder. It always seemed ages before the grand opening happened and we sat anxiously and salivating while watching dad disrobe the freezer and brush the excess ice away so as not to get any salt into the icecream container. We all had our bowls ready as dad pryed the lid off and gave it a taste test and and assured us it was the best ever and I believe that made it taste even better. I was the youngest so I got first helping and hurried off to sit on the backporch step and probably took a bite before I was fully seated. I wanted to make it last but homemade ice cream melts fast and my brother and sisters were bending their elbows faster than me so all the bowls were soon licked clean....Yum yum yum