Our ice maker broke and I’ve been thinking about buying some ice cube trays instead of getting it fixed. Ice cube trays are cheap compared to paying a professional to try to fix it, if they can fix it at all.
Then I remembered how annoying ice cube trays are. We had them growing up before my mom splurged and got a really nice fridge with a built in ice maker. But the majority of my teenage years were spent toiling with ice cube trays.
Growing up in Ohio where the summers could be sweltering hot, ice was important. But man were those trays obnoxious. You’d have to fill each little empty cube with water. Then stack or carry the trays one at a time to the freezer. Any misstep and water would splash onto the floor. Then you’d have to set them carefully on the metal shelf so they wouldn’t spill again. And then … you waited.
Once they were frozen you had to crack them out of the trays. This meant twisting and turning the plastic to pop them out. Sometimes the water froze weird and they would crumble. If you twisted too hard the trays would crack. Sometimes the cubes popped right out.
But the most annoying thing was when you really needed an ice cube and you’d open the freezer only to find that all the trays were empty. No ice in the bin either. The last person hadn’t bothered to refill the trays when they were done. This is on par with not replacing the toilet paper roll, but I digress.
But we always used every darn cube of ice we made. There was rarely an abundance of ice cubes just lying in wait in our freezer. We used what we made and then made more.
This whole thing was inconvenient, but we never wasted ice. Compare this to our now defunct ice maker, which typically had piles and piles of unused ice that would freeze into a block and have to be chipped out. Then the motor would kick in again and start the whole process over. It would take hours for the tray to fill up and by that point no one needed ice anymore.
It’s convenient and easy to have a machine make an abundance of ice for whenever we might need it. It’s also incredibly wasteful often making way more ice than you’d ever need in one sitting. We can justify it because every once in a while we need a lot of ice. But most of the time we only need a cube or two.
Ice cube trays are more work for less ice. But there’s rarely any waste. And you’re more careful with how you make it and how you use it. You put in the work of filling each tray. Carefully carrying them to the freezer. Placing them gently inside. And you wait patiently for them. That’s investment you don’t have in machines of convenience. And because of that investment you value the end product more. Not to mention you develop a process for creating the ice and if you want ice next time you have to plan ahead.
We lose so much of this with machines of convenience. We aren’t invested in the end product or the process that created it so we almost always waste it. We’ve gotten so accustomed to not being inconvenienced that we fail to appreciate what goes into making the things we need and use.
Maybe we can’t measure if you enjoy your lemonade more with manually made ice cubes. But perhaps we can flip our thinking about being inconvenienced and instead appreciate that a little hard work up front is a good thing. That time spent and scarcity can help us be more connected to what we do have in lieu of perpetual abundance.
Guess I’ll be buying those trays now.
