I hope your 4th was full of ice cream

The deadline for the column this week slipped upon me like a sneeze. I capture column ideas on my iPhone’s notepad app, but this week none of them seemed to resonate. Last night after dinner as Jilda caught up on Facebook birthdays she said, “Why don’t we have a root beer float? It will keep your brain from overheating while you fret about your column.”  Between the slurps of our frothy treat, she said, “You could write about ice cream.” With the Fourth of July just around the corner, I realized it was a perfect idea.

I loved the Fourth of July as a kid. What could be more fun than firecracker battles and bottle rocket wars? It’s a wonder someone didn’t lose an eye or a finger. But the other thing I loved about the holiday was the homemade ice cream. 

We spent all holidays with my mother’s family. Easter at Aunt Edra Mae’s, Christmas Day at my Grandmother Ferguson’s, and the Fourth of July at Aunt Edith’s.

The food was a big part of the celebrating. Tables were laden with fresh corn, green beans, Cole slaw, and potato salad along with just about any meat we could imagine. 

Every year, my aunts tried to outdo each other on desserts. Pineapple upside down cake, banana pudding, coconut and red velvet cake with a few pecan pies thrown in for good measure. 

But my favorite dessert was the homemade ice cream. While the pots and pans rattled in the kitchen, the kids assembled on the front porch for ice cream duty. 

Across the edge of the porch was a squad of ice cream freezers assembled like a line of multicolored maple soldiers. Time and use had muted their finishes to the colors of a fading rainbow.

The menfolk hauled tubs of ice onto the porch and packed the freezers full of ice and sprinkled tiny nuggets of rock salt across the top. That’s when the cranking commenced.

One kid would sit on the freezer to stabilize it while the other one turned. They switched when one's arm got tired, or the other one’s rear end got cold. When the cranking started, the twirling bucket in the ice cracked and popped like car wheels on a gravel road.

As the ice cream hardened in the bucket, cranking became tiresome, and the kids switched from sitting to cranking more frequently, but that was good because we knew it wouldn’t be long before we’d be enjoying the fruits of our labor.

The table food was good on the Fourth of July, but I always saved room to sample all the different flavors of ice cream. Inevitably you’d see a kid slap himself in the eye with the palm of his hand and scream, “BRAIN FREEZE.” But a momentary excruciating headache was a small price to pay for something that good. 

Several years ago, Jilda and I bought an electric ice cream maker. It feels a little like cheating when she whips up a batch of vanilla ice cream, and all I have to do is plug it up. I guess there are a few cases when cheaters do win.

Happy Fourth of July.