Ice cream and summer

via GIPHY

Tonight we had ice cream for dessert.  It's our current favorite....Sea Salt and Caramel.  As I was eating I told the guys that when summer hits, I go back to summers growing up in Fountain City.  We were walking the other day and all of a sudden I said to Tommy..."do you smell that?"  That is a smell that I have only smelled in Fountain City in the summer.  It's unique to Fountain City.  I can't describe it, but it always takes me back to my childhood.  It's a sweet, cloying smell.

Eating ice cream takes me back as well.  Almost from the very first hot summer day, we would start begging for homemade ice cream.  We got ice cream from Kay's all during the year, but in the summer we wanted homemade.  Mother would make a custard on the stove, and Daddy would pull out the ancient ice cream maker and ice cream salt.  Then came the very best part. ....... PEACHES from the market over on Forest Avenue!  Farmers would come from all around and park their trucks with produce and Daddy and I would go shopping.  We bought beans and corn and all sorts of things for Mother to can.  

But...the best thing was peaches!  How I loved those.  I even liked the fuzzy peeling!  When we dumped the peaches into the ice cream, I could already taste it.  Sometimes Daddy would let us help turn the crank, but mostly he did it.  When he started having trouble turning the handle we knew it was just about ready.  That's when my sister Teresa and I started claiming "the paddle." We both wanted to be the one to get to lick the ice cream off  the paddle!

I don't think people make ice cream anymore.  How sad.  There is no ice cream anywhere that tastes like homemade.  They can advertise "tastes like homemade," but in reality, none of it does.

Do you ever wish, for just a day, you could go back to those simpler times?  Back before cell phones and video games and tv and all the distractions.  ( I actually saw two girls running on the Tweetsie Trail in Elizabethton today carrying their cell phones! What is wrong with our world!)

Summer is here.  Put your cell phone and your computer and your tv in a room, lock the door, and go outside with your family and make a big freezer of ice cream.  Invite the neighbors in, give the kids a jar with holes in the lids to catch fireflies, and listen to the katydids sing. ​