The water line to the refrigerator’s ice maker cracked years ago, ruined the kitchen’s oak-wood floor, and was permanently abandoned.  My daughter Laura has an amazing countertop ice-maker, producing pleasing, soft-crunchy cubes of pellet ice.  But Mom opted for a dozen of the old ice cube trays.  I confess to using my share of ice cubes for the day’s cold drinks, but it seems that every day I reach into the freezer only to find an empty ice bin.  Mom’s household routine used to include filling the empty trays at the kitchen sink and carrying them expertly to the freezer, without spilling: two stacks, six-high.  But with her walker a necessary tool of her daily perambulating, the chore has more often fallen to me.  With a busy schedule, running from one task and job and activity to another all the day long, the mental stoppage of finding the empty ice bin and needing to empty the ice cube trays into the bin and then to fill the trays with new water, has been a real irritant.  Mom uses by far more ice that I do, so I naturally expect her to fill the trays.  (Can I hear my readers offering sympathetic words of “Aw, you poor thing?”  I thank you.)  One reason the ice runs out so quickly is that Mom fills the trays only halfway, yielding half-cubes, naturally.  I, on the other hand, fill the trays completely, to yield large cubes lasting us twice as long.  Mom beat me to the job of filling the trays the other day: when, all twelve trays of cubes barely filled the bin.  “Mom,” I whined.  “Why do you fill the trays only half-full?”  Looking downcast, she explained, “I don’t like such big cubes.”  Besides her daytime use, her nighttime habit is to take a cup-full of cubes to her bedroom, to suck on them during her bedtime routine—and now I understand the desire for half-cubes.  The big cubes really are impossibly uncomfortably big and sharp to fit into one’s mouth and enjoy.  In fact, it might be similar to cramming a whole apple into one’s mouth instead of enjoying one reasonable bite at a time.  Half cubes it is, then.