My father retired from the Air Force when I was 12 years old. Seventh grade was a tough time to change schools, but because we had moved a few times I knew how to do it because I had already done it a couple of times in my few years at school. We moved from Patrick Air Force Base on the East Coast of Florida to Central Florida near Ocala.
It was good! My brother and I had a room together, my grandmother had her own bedroom, and then my parents were on the other end of the house in the master bedroom suite.
Summers in Florida are hot! And we had moved into a brand-new house that my parents had built. Central air conditioning was awesome! And the refrigerator had something that we had never had before, an icemaker!
My brother and I love making sweet tea and putting gobs of ice in our glasses and pouring the tea over the ice while it was still hot so that when we drink it the ice was almost melted and the tea was cold. Of course this took a lot of ice and so for the first few months or so as things warmed up in the spring and early summer we used a lot of ice to the point that when my mom and dad got home from work there would be no ice in the ice maker tray for them to use.
After a few weeks of grumbling about no ice and maybe the ice machine was too slow my Mom caught on to what we were doing when we would make tea. She then made a rule that we could not have any more than four pieces of ice in our cup at a time.
My brother and I were devastated! Now our plan when we made tea didn't work and we had to come up with something different. So we would make the tea and then let it all cool then put it in the refrigerator and make sure that it was cold before we drink it. Which is what we should've been doing in the first place, but because we had the new icemaker we thought that we could just use the ice.
When the icemaker broke we had to switch back to ice trays which is a pain in and of itself. That led to arguments over somebody not filling the ice trays and me and my brother coming up with more efficient ways to fill the ice trays after we emptied the (he was always better that than me).
But to this day when I go to get ice I feel a twinge of something when I take more than four pieces of ice, whether it's by hand, from a tray, or from a dispenser in the door
The memories of childhood...