The Coldest Evening of the Summer
The coldest evening of the summer was the sixth of July, which sounds impossible until you remember that we had a wet, grey, strange month and the temperature dropped nine degrees between six and ten in the evening. It was the kind of cold that does not feel like winter but feels like something has gone wrong with the sky.
The chest freezer died at about eight. We heard it stop, and then we heard the silence, which in a house full of a running machine is a very loud thing. The ice cream had been in there since Sunday, in four tubs, and we had plans for it that involved the end of the week.
So we did what my grandfather did before us, which was to move the food and improvise. The tubs came out and went into the deep stone sink in the back kitchen, wrapped in the heavy wool blankets from the top cupboard, and we filled the sink with cold water from the well, using a bucket at a time, because the well water in the evening is the coldest we can get. We pushed the cold water around the tubs every half hour, and my sister sat on the step with a torch and kept the light on them so we could see the level.
We got up at five to change the water one last time, and by then the tubs were firm again and cold to the touch, though the ice cream had the texture of something that had been through a difficult night. We ate it that morning with bread, standing at the counter, and my mother said it tasted like winter, and that we should never say that again, and then we had some more.
The freezer came back on the third day, with a new part and a small hole cut in the wall behind it, which my mother insists was there all along.