(This is based on stories my mom told me about growing up during the depression. The medicine show mention is an allusion to a short story she wrote that I helped out with editing. This is *not* my mom’s voice, however.)
When I think back about that day, before we went to the medicine show, I start by remembering the heat, and the dry. Kansas is a hot, dry place in June.
My father had brought home some shards of ice. He had gleaned them from the train station, where the blocks were shipped in and delivered to local households. Workers would hoist them out of the train cars and onto a conveyor, to insulated trucks. Sometimes a worker would fumble, a block would fall, and if it cracked the workers would just leave the pieces. Father was friends with one of the workers. That’s how it was back then. A man would use his connections for the chance to pick up dust-covered ice and carry it home for his family. Sometimes the workers would drop the ice on purpose.
Father had given a shard each to me and my sister. We managed to smile, despite near heat-stroke. We were happy to get the ice, and we’d have danced around if it wouldn’t have just made us hotter. Mother put the remaining chunks into the icebox, along with the rapidly-melting piece already therein.
I remember my father saying, in the course of saying something else, that it was hotter than Hades. My mother frowned at him and glanced at us, the innocents. He gave a sheepish look.
The rest of the day was nothing but playing card games and complaining about how hot it was, the shards of ice long forgotten.
Finally, the sun went behind a tree to the west of the house, and we fell incrementally into the cool of evening.
