Grandma’s Peach Ice Cream on the Porch

It needs an hour to harden. Then I started the next batch, and Rowan went right back to the handle.

By one o’clock, the line had gone past the end of Grandma’s walk, down the sidewalk, and was bending out toward the curb.

People who were not even in line were standing on Grandma’s lawn talking.

Augusta came over from the committee table. She stood at the bottom of the steps with her clipboard against her chest, and she looked at all six cranks, and she looked at Grandma, and she shook her head.

“Geneva,” she said, “I am so sorry. I didn’t know you still wanted to. I should have asked you myself.”

“Don’t you worry,” Grandma said. “It’s my porch. I can make ice cream on my own porch.”

Augusta laughed and asked whether she could take a few bowls back for the volunteers at the grill. Grandma sent her back with a whole gallon in a stockpot.

Lavern Huber came at one thirty in a clean seed cap and a pressed shirt, which for Lavern is the same as a tuxedo.

He did not get in line. He walked up the side of the porch and stood by the cranks he had loaned me.

“Mine still turning?” he asked.

“Both of them,” I said. “One of the girls from the dairy family has been on the squeaky one for an hour. She says she likes the noise.”

He nodded, satisfied, and put his hand on the cedar bucket like he was patting a good horse.

Then he sat down in the woven chair near Grandma and took a bowl, and the two of them ate without saying a word.

People kept coming. Mothers with strollers. Teenage boys pretending they were only there to help their little sisters.

A young couple who had just bought the old house by the grain bins. Three men from the volunteer fire department, still in their station shirts.

The firemen took over two cranks so the smallest kids could just sit and watch.

The biggest one, a heavy man with a gray beard, said he had stood in Geneva’s line every year since he was in diapers and he was not stopping now.

My dad and his younger brother rotated the full buckets out to the shade by the stock tank and packed them down.

My husband kept the ice coming. I kept pouring mix, and Grandma kept telling every child, “Slow and steady.”

At two o’clock I looked across the street for the first time in a while.

The pavilion has six long tables under a metal roof. Down at the end, on a folding table with a red tablecloth, sat the store tubs.

Twelve of them, maybe more, the big three-gallon kind from the wholesale club. Chocolate, vanilla, strawberry.

Pamela was standing behind them with a scoop in her hand and a stack of paper bowls.

Her husband was beside her, holding a roll of paper towels. He is a good man, and he looked like he wanted to be somewhere else.

Nobody was in front of their table. Not one person.

Every few minutes somebody would walk past it, look at the tubs, and keep walking, out of the pavilion and across the street toward us.