Posted Oct 22, 2002. Reposted July 7, 2003. Happy birthday, Momma!

We used to get the first watermelon of the year on my mother's birthday, July 7. At least one year we went to the ice house to get it.

I was a little girl at the time, and approaching the ice house I found it at once seedy and mysterious. As I remember it now, it stood well above the ground with no screen over its underpinnings, on an unkempt lot of packed earth that sprouted weeds, sheathed in rusting corrugated metal, dripping. I hesitated at the steep wooden steps leading up to the office, listening to the water drip, slightly amplified by the cavernous underbelly of the building.

My father pressed ahead. I don't have a clear memory of the watermelons. There were a lot of them, dark green with paler hieroglyphics, but whether they were outside or in the office or whether they were kept on ice in the bowels of the building I couldn't say. Once inside the building it was deliciously cool, and murmurous with another sound of water, its faint rustle as it circulated in a metal tub, and the hum of the pumps that moved it.

While my father paid for the melon I stood on tiptoe and peered into the tub. It was alive with small goldfish! Pale ones and drab ones, white ones and white-splashed- with-orange and golden ones nosing through the tub like glowing, living embers. It was years before I caught on to what "bait" meant, but we came away with a fish in a plastic bag, as well as with the melon.

The ice house, with its eerie dripping and its magical coolness, sunk below my memories, until one day, when I sweltered on a shadeless asphalt parking lot at the beginning of the summer, and sold water plants from a fiberglass tub. My customer complained about the high price of koi in the pet stores, when all she wanted was gleams of gold, not a fish with a pedigree.

I all but shivered for the welcome chill that flashed through my flesh.

"Try a bait shop" I suggested, "Or the feeder fish at a pet store." She blessed me for my sagacity.

The few times I've reminisced to friends about the ice house, I've mostly been met by blank stares. But I'm not alone. I was sucked into Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude by its opening sentence: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

By Ruby Jung. All rights reserved to the story. I made the background and you are welcome to copy and use it.