Grandma’s Peach Ice Cream on the Porch

I bought fifty pounds of rock salt at the feed store and ten half-gallons of cream and a case of whole milk from the grocery.

The girl at the register asked if I was opening a dairy.

The peaches came from a man who parks a pickup full of baskets at the edge of town every summer.

Indiana peaches are not ready by the Fourth, so his come up from South Carolina. They were ripe enough to smell from the car.

I bought two bushels. That is close to a hundred pounds of fruit. The man threw in a half-peck of extras because I told him what they were for.

That afternoon Grandma and I sat at her kitchen table and peeled.

You dip the peaches in boiling water for half a minute, then cold water, and the skins slip off like a glove. Grandma had done it ten thousand times.

Her hands were slow. Every so often she would set the paring knife down and rub her knuckles. But she did not stop, and she would not let me take over.

“Your aunt used to sit right where you’re sitting,” she said while we worked. “She’d peel three and eat two. I used to swat her with a dish towel.”

She smiled at that. Then she got quiet again, and I let her be quiet.

“In 1974 she was 12,” Grandma said after a while.

“That first year, she got the dasher. That’s the paddle in the middle, you know. When it’s done, you pull it out, and whoever gets it gets to lick it clean.”

“I remember,” I said. “I got it once when I was about seven. I thought I’d won the county fair.”

“She sat on the porch step with it and got peach all down her front,” Grandma said.

“Her daddy laughed until he had to sit down. Every year after that, she got the dasher. Until she said she was too big for it.”

She went back to peeling. A peach slid out of her fingers into the bowl. She picked up another one.

“She’s not a bad girl,” Grandma said. “She’s just scared. She’s been scared since 1998. I can’t fix that for her.”

I did not answer. There was nothing to say that would not sound like I was choosing a side.

We mashed the peaches with a potato masher in Grandma’s big crock bowl, sugared them, and set them in the refrigerator in the old pickle jars she has saved since before I was born. The kitchen smelled like the whole summer.

That evening I sent one text to the family group. I wrote it three times before I sent it, so it would not sound like a fight.

“Grandma is making her peach ice cream on her own front porch tomorrow, starting at eleven. Anybody who wants to turn a handle is welcome. Bring a hat.”

My dad answered with a thumbs-up. My cousins answered with hearts. Pamela did not answer at all, which was not like her. She answers everything.

I lay awake for a while that night wondering whether I had done something mean. Then I thought about Grandma’s face in the church hallway, and I went to sleep.