I’ve just been writing about ice. In my milk delivery days, we used to carry ice in the trucks in the summertime covered with heavy canvases. Actually ice in the summertime, or in mild climates, has only come about with the invention of refrigeration. In England from prehistoric times, you can see a passageway in Cornwall that catches the wind and game was hung there to keep it cool – called a fogue. I have a book of letters by E. Parmalee Prentice, where he quotes Sir Walter Scott in 1822 saying that he built an icehouse last year and could get no ice to fill it, so this year, he says, “I packed it full of hard-rammed snow, which in March was already melting.” My sister owns property on a remote lake in New Brunswick, only a mile from the ocean, and all during the 19th century, ice was harvested from it, skidded on long wooden tracks to the shore and shipped to Boston and New York for summer use in hotels. In my own childhood, we cut ice from the river and kept it in an icehouse covered with sawdust, and it lasted most of the summer. There were big icehouses on the river. Many memoirs talk about following the ice man and gleaning shards of ice to suck. My elderly generation still often refers to an ice box instead of a ‘frig. Well enough about ice. Daylights savings time and (dare I say it?) spring are upon us.