I was about to tell a little story but instead I will start by saying, you have got to be kidding me. An old fashioned wooden ice cream maker is $85?!? And that’s the cheap one. Good grief.

Story. When I was a little girl we lived for a while in central Pennsylvania (which is why I know how to spell Punxsutawney). The husband of one of the “office ladies” where my dad worked, together with his brother and his wife, owned a small farm out in the country. It was their homestead–where they’d grown up. It was on a dirt road near a town that simply no longer exists–it was pretty much a ghost town even as I remember it. After church, and changing clothes, the two families would go out to the farm to spend the rest of the day. Soon after we moved, they invited my family to join them and it became a weekly thing.

The place had a nice big yard, two little creeks running through it, and a stand of pines. There was a picnic shelter with a fireplace for roasting marshmallows. A dirt path across the unpaved road wound its way up a hillside where wild strawberries grew. Bucketfuls for the picking.

The afternoon would start with the men doing chores–cutting the grass (hand pushed rotary mower back in those days), whitewashing the tree trunks, fixing a window screen–and the women would tend to kitchen stuff. We kids were left to our own devices. I recall picking bunches of mint that grew near one of the creeks. Climbing trees and eating wild teaberries. My brother, cousin, and I got lost in the woods once. Grownups really did go looking for us.

You already know where this is headed on a warm summer Sunday afternoon. Hand-cranked ice cream with the kids taking turns cranking.

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