Help pls what is this paragraph talks about-

Cold comfort

To stock the box, city people bought ice, and country dwellers harvested it. In Robinhood, Maine, where Faith Reyher Jackson, 86, grew up, ice cutting was an all-town, all-day event, done at a neighbor’s pond in the dead of winter. “They used saws and these 20 big tongs to pull it out,” she says. Then it was hauled from home to home on a horse-drawn cart, packed in sawdust, and put in the family’s icehouse, where, she says, it lasted for months. City people depended on a delivery from the iceman. “Kids would chase him down the street, and he’d chip off a piece of ice and give it to them,” says B. J. Smith, 84, who was reared in Lima, Ohio. Customers used a card in their window to place orders. The iceman, with a burlap or leather pad protecting his shoulder, would hoist a block weighing up to 100 pounds. When commercial ice houses opened in the early 1800s, they were considered a business with a future. But by the end of the century, pond ice was polluted. That, and unusually hot summers in 1889 and 1890, pushed ahead the advent of refrigerators.

1aspic: a jelly made of fish or meat stock that is used to make a mold