The Ice Harvest Thing

Started, I think, with fermentation. Or possibly brine. I was reading something about kimchi, something I'd half-remembered from a cooking thread, the kind of thing you skim at 10pm and tell yourself you'll revisit, and then there was a footnote, and the footnote had a link, and the link was about salt preservation, and salt preservation apparently connects, in a way that felt inevitable once I was already in it, to commercial ice production in the mid-1800s.

By the time I looked up it was past midnight and I knew more about Frederic Tudor's ice-cutting operation on Fresh Pond than I have ever needed to know about anything. Tudor shipped ice to Calcutta. In the 1830s. They packed it in sawdust. I genuinely could not stop reading. I fell asleep with the tab still open and woke up with it still there, the cursor blinking at a paragraph about the railroad's effect on regional ice delivery, as if it had been waiting.

I told Simone about it at the end of shift today. Not as a recommendation, just as a confession. She listened to the whole fermentation-to-Frederic-Tudor-to-railroad arc with the particular expression she gets when she is deciding whether the information earns the enthusiasm.

Simone reading the ice harvesting paragraph. That face.

Then she said one word. Not about ice. About the thing underneath the thing, the reason a footnote at 10pm becomes a two-hour detour and a restless sleep. She named it before I'd finished the sentence.

She named it in one word. She always does.

I'm tired in the specific way of a week where I slept fine but the mind did extra hours. The prints are still against the kitchen wall. Gerald has a new leaf I haven't written about yet. The light in the kitchen is doing something different in the evenings and I keep meaning to name it. But the ice thing, I think the ice thing was what September needed, actually. A door that opened sideways and went somewhere nobody asked it to go.