Grandma’s Peach Ice Cream on the Porch

I understand her fear. I am a pharmacy tech at the drugstore in Greensburg, and I have filled heart prescriptions for half the county. I know what heat and age can do.

But Pamela did not argue it out with her mother at the kitchen table. She went around her.

She called the committee and told them, and she let Grandma find out in a church hallway from Augusta.

That was the part I could not get past.

That evening I sat on Grandma’s back step while she shelled peas into a dishpan. The sun was still high.

The barn swallows were working the yard. She shelled for a long time before she said anything.

“Don’t you start anything with your aunt,” she said finally. “She means well. She has always meant well. That is the hard thing about Pamela.”

“I wasn’t going to start anything,” I said. That was mostly true. I had been thinking about calling Pamela the whole afternoon, and I had picked up my phone twice.

But I knew how it would go. Pamela would explain why she was right, and she would be loud about it, and then it would get back to the whole town that Geneva’s family was fighting over ice cream.

Grandma would never stand for that. She would not argue with her own daughter in front of the town, not about ice cream, not about anything.

She would rather give the whole thing up and smile about it.

So I asked her a different question. “Do you want to make it this year, Grandma? Just tell me the truth. If you’re tired, that’s all right.”

She stopped shelling. She looked at her hands, which have arthritis in the knuckles and a burn scar from a cookstove in 1951. Then she looked at me.

“I have made it every year since your daddy was in grade school,” she said. “I would like to make it one more time without anybody telling me I can’t.”

That was all I needed.

Now, Grandma’s house sits on the corner of Main and the park road, an old white two-story with a deep front porch.

That porch faces the town park straight across the street, the same park where the picnic is held.

I did not need the committee. I did not need the pavilion. I did not need to take anything away from Pamela.

Grandma’s porch was hers, and nobody could tell her what she could make on it.

The trouble was the arithmetic. One crank makes about a gallon and a half if you fill it right.

Grandma usually made four or five batches through the afternoon, with my dad and his brothers spelling her on the handle.

I wanted more than that. I wanted enough that nobody could miss it.

I wanted every child in town to get a turn on a handle, the way I did when I was small.

So on Monday, after my shift, I drove out to Lavern Huber’s place on the county road. Lavern is 80.

He farmed next to my grandparents for forty years and still keeps everything he ever owned in a long machine shed.

He was out by the shed in a seed cap and work boots, sharpening a mower blade on a bench grinder.