Grandma’s Peach Ice Cream on the Porch

He shut it off when he saw my car and waited while I explained.

He listened all the way through without interrupting. Then he spat to one side, wiped his hands on a rag, and said, “Come on. I think I’ve got two of them.”

He did. They were up on a shelf behind a box of fence insulators, dusty and dry.

One had a cedar bucket and a good tight gear, and the other was older, with a gear that squeaked like a gate.

Lavern turned each handle a few times. He found a can of food-grade oil and put three drops on the gears, the way you would on a sewing machine.

“These still turn,” he said. “My wife used to make butter pecan in this one. She’d want it used. You tell Geneva it’s on loan till she’s done with it.”

He also told me a story I had never heard.

In 1974, he said, the picnic had store ice cream too, a few cardboard cartons from the grocery that went soft in an hour. Then Grandma walked over with her one crank.

“Folks left that store stuff sitting,” he said, laughing. “Your grandpa was so proud he about busted. He carried the bucket across the street himself.”

That made three cranks counting Grandma’s. I got the other three by Wednesday.

One came from a widow up the road who keeps chickens and sells eggs out of a cooler at the end of her lane.

Her crank was electric once, but the motor had burned out years ago, and her son had rigged a hand crank back on it.

One came from a dairy family south of town. The mother had bought it new for her kids in the eighties and never used it after they grew up.

It still had the paper instructions folded inside the lid.

The last came from the man who runs the parts counter at the implement dealer. He did not say much.

He set it on the counter, said, “Bring it back clean,” and went back to his catalog.

That made six. I lined them up in Grandma’s garage and she came out in her house shoes to look at them. She walked down the row and touched every one.

“Well,” she said, “look at all of you.” She was talking to the cranks. Then she went back inside without another word, and I heard her humming at the sink.

Then the ice. Every batch of hand-cranked ice cream takes close to twenty pounds of ice and a good deal of rock salt, and with six cranks going all afternoon I figured twenty batches.

My husband handled that part. He drives a truck for the grain elevator and he knows how to load anything.

He said, “How much?” and I said four hundred pounds, and he did not even blink.

On the morning of the third he went to the farm co-op on the highway, where Elvin runs the ice machine out back.

Elvin filled forty ten-pound bags and helped stack them in two chest coolers and a stock tank.

When my husband tried to pay full price, Elvin knocked off a third. “That’s for Geneva,” he said. “My mother took me to that picnic every year. I’d stand in her line twice.”