Summer Sweet Spot Snapshot
Where I find some joy—and serious Mom Power
Yesterday afternoon I went to a seasonal ice cream shop about three miles from my house. I have been there about half a dozen times so far this summer.
On the way there I pass a few restaurants and bars, a warehouse, a hardware store, and a gas station, among other small commercial enterprises. There are also a couple of churches and non-profit organizations. But most of the drive is through residential neighborhoods with sidewalks and lots of shotgun and camel back houses.
I like to get a large chocolate and vanilla swirl in a cake cone with sprinkles. Yesterday a young woman named Jayla took my order. “No change,” I told her when I paid. She dropped the extra into a small metal bucket on the counter by the register and clanged a cowbell. “Woo!” she and all the other employees hooted. They do this every time a customer leaves a tip. Clang! Clang! Clang! “Woo!” I always leave a tip.
After I placed my order I stepped to the side to let the next customer place his order. He was wearing a sleeveless t-shirt, swim trunks, and leopard-print slippers. I waited for my order near a basket of pink and yellow pansies hanging from one corner of the canopy that trims the blocky, squat building.
A young mother with two young children sat at one of the three round black metal tables on the front patio. Each table has a rose-colored umbrella. The woman’s children were each finishing an ice cream cone. The cones had become soggy from their melting contents. They oozed and dripped.
The children had ice cream everywhere. On their legs, their arms, their foreheads and hands, the fronts of their t-shirts. As their mother talked on her phone, the children sat at the table swinging their legs back and forth, squishing and mashing their cones with their fingers into their mouths.
I remembered my own days as a parent of young children and the astonishing ability to tune out all manner of monumental messes. Like, I can’t believe what I am seeing—if I ignore it maybe it’s not happening or will go away!
I also recalled another mother with a young child in line in front of me one day last week. The child had started to cry and reach upward toward her mother. Her mother picked the child up. The child began to cry harder. The mother began to bounce her on her hip and sway from side to side. The child cried even harder, somehow.
Then the child began to arch backwards over her mother’s arm around her waist and shake her head from side to side. Then she retracted herself and put her head against her mother’s shoulder. Then back again, forward once more, and so on. I was close enough to see the child’s perfect, white teeth as she howled and heaved. Tears streaked her face.
When it was her mother’s turn at the window she stepped forward to place her order as well as one for a friend waiting at one of the patio tables with two children of her own. I so related to and was so impressed by her being able to tune out her child’s spectacular caterwauling. I was also glad that somehow I still have the capacity. The clamor did not bother me. Maybe it’s an eternal maternal superpower. Go, moms!
Yesterday afternoon when the younger girl of the two at the table with her mother finished her cone she toddled over to a nearby trashcan with a handful of crinkled napkins. She studied the big-barreled container with the square top and hinged flap opening. She could probably fit four of herself inside it.
She looked over at her mother and big sister. She looked back at the trash can. She poked at the flap. “Do it already!” her older sister hollered. The younger girl jabbed at the flap and stuffed the napkins through the opening. The flap snapped back and trapped a few napkins. The girl poked the flap again. The napkins fell through the opening. The girl trotted back to the table to join her mother and sister.
Just on the other side of the order pick-up window I could see an employee named D’Mari making my cone. D’Mari is about 18. He has worked at the shop for two summers. His smile really pops against the bright purple shirt he and other staff wear.
“How many sprinkles you want today?” D’Mari asked me. “Just enough to add some crunch,” I said. “I hear ya’!” he said. He shook some sprinkles from a spoon onto the ice cream, gently tilting and turning the cone to get the right angle for the sprinkles to hit the ice cream. Then he drew a wad of napkins from a nearby dispenser, wrapped them around the bottom of the cone, and passed it to me through the window.
I walked around to the side of the building next to the parking area. There are four heavy-duty plastic picnic tables there, getting a sliver of shade from the canopy this time of day. They are a big improvement over the aluminum tables they recently replaced. They don’t get as hot and they don’t throw off any glare from the sun.
I sat at the table closest to the patio. A couple with a baby in a stroller sat at the next table. The parents were sharing a sundae. Chubby legs kicked out from the stroller. Music from a local pop radio station played from some speakers under the canopy. A jet passed overhead, approaching the airport about four miles south.
I heard some change drop into the tip bucket. The cowbell clanged. “Woo!” Reaching the bottom of my cone I peeled off the label. “Joy,” it says.
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I was sitting there with you. Good writing does that. And the ice cream? We all need a guilty pleasure.
Woot woot for an icecream kinda day! Fun Sunday Morning read Polly!