I can now say without fear of contradiction that it’s officially fall here at Dactyl Manor.
Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking something along the lines of, “Well, duh! It’s getting cold out, the leaves are falling off the trees, the nights are longer than the days, the calendar says it’s November….” You’re probably also wondering which of these signs was my first clue. And my answer is: None of them.
The way I can tell that it’s fall has nothing to do with the calendar, the weather, or anything like that. The way I can tell that it’s fall is that the ice maker is working again.
It never fails. When the weather’s getting warm and it’s getting to be that time of year when a nice cold glass of lemonade with ice cubes floating in it would really hit the spot, that’s when the ice maker is going to break. It doesn’t happen every year, but in the seven years I’ve been living in this house, I’ve had to fix the icemaker three times. And every time, it’s the same thing, the tube carrying water to the freezer compartment dries out, splits, and leaves a puddle on the floor.
Fortunately for Wylie, this had already happened once before he moved in, so at least I knew not to blame it on him. (As a complete aside, if anyone can offer a reasonable explanation for how a tube full of water can dry out, I’d love to hear it.)
It also never fails that when the icemaker breaks down, it’s one of those years when I’m frantically busy and can’t spare the hour it takes to gather up the tools and replace five feet of plastic tubing. As a result, every time the icemaker’s broken, it’s generally taken me around six months to get around to fixing it. Generally, right around the time it starts getting cold out.
The ice maker broke sometime in May and all summer long I drank my beverages without ice. And following the seasons of the year, I finally found a chance to repair it this evening.
It must be fall.