The deep snow crunched underfoot, the cold wind that bristled against my face felt prickly and my fingertips were numb. I pulled the hood of my puffy coat over my head, the fur falling down covering my eyes, stuffed my hands in my jacket pocket, slumped down in my seat and started clicking my nails.
I had planned a grand opening, but after the place didn’t get finished until close to Halloween, I thought that I’d wait until then. People came from all around for our Pumpkin Roll. I’d flooded my social media accounts, though, passed out flyers and given my friend who owned a food truck samples to give away on Walnut Wednesdays—Walnut, a street in downtown Cleveland where food trucks gathered at lunchtime on that day each week. I thought all of that would bring people in.
I had been just as wrong as Maisie.
I wondered what my PopPop was going to say about all of this. I had to go and see him and tell him what happened. Let him know what a bust the day had been.
And I wondered if he was going to feel let down about passing the reins over to me.
Me and my big ideas. Maybe they’d been too much. My brothers had said it to me enough times.
“Jasper! Come back!” A voice far off wafted my way. The noise jolted me out of my disappointment. I sat up straight and looked toward the voice. It came from down by the movie theater, marquee lights showing only a shadowy, ambiguous figure.
Footsteps came crunching in the snow toward me, but in the haze of the night, blurry streetlights and the tears threatening to fall, I could only get a glance. And then the figure was out of my sight. The same high-pitched voice near the marquee called out again. “She’s not coming back!” it said.
I chuckled. That would never have been one of us kids, running away after being called. I could just imagine what kind of trouble he’d be in when whoever was calling him caught up with him. My senses no longer dulled, I realized it probably wasn’t too smart to sit in the cold any longer.
I stood up to go, pain coursing through my nearly frostbitten fingers as I pulled the knapsack over my shoulder.
“I need gloves,” I mumbled. I remembered the ones my mother had given me. I reached inside my knapsack to get them and my nails hit the tin.
Grandma Kay.
I pulled it out and sat back down.
I hadn’t ever taken the time to look through her recipe box. The morning had been so hectic and the rest of the day so harrowing. I had forgotten all about it.
I opened it up and pulled out a card. The emotion that struck me when I saw which one it was almost choked me. The amber light from the lanterns revealed her little scribblings on the card, her side notes and the date she’d written it.
The recipe? It was for ice cream made from snow.
Snow, the one thing that right now was ruining the business she had started. Still, I had to smile. Snow was also one of the things that my grandma loved. Whenever it would snow, she’d round us kids up, we’d go out, get snow and she’d make ice cream just for us.
My grandmother hadn’t ever seen snow before leaving the south and was fond of telling us grandkids the story of how her uncle had at one time traveled north. Once arriving back home, she said he couldn’t stop talking about how wonderful everything up here was—people living high, colored folks going wherever they wanted. They even, he had told her, had cotton falling from the sky. For a family of sharecroppers, that was just like equating snow to manna from heaven. And it was what made my grandmother always dream of moving north.
“There has to be at least a foot of it,” she used to say about making snow ice cream. “And it has to be fresh-fallen snow. Otherwise it won’t taste as sweet.”
I chuckled. There was nothing sweet about this newly fallen snow. I dug the toe of my UGG boot into it and gave it a kick. The white particles floated through the air.
No. This snow had been a curse.
But then I thought how my Grandma Kay always made the best out of everything, and she didn’t let much stop her. Not even the disease that finally took her from us.
I decided I wasn’t going to let this beat me either.
I was going to make the best of it. I was going to make some ice cream. From snow.
“You won’t defeat me. And you won’t stop me,” I said with a nod. I’d even take some to PopPop. It would probably be easier to face him if I came bearing gifts anyway. Especially when it was the kind of gift I knew he’d enjoy.
I put the recipe box back in my knapsack. I stood up, walked around to the side door, pulled the key to the store out of my pocket and went back inside.
I grabbed the top bowl from a stack of aluminum ones, then put it back. It was too small. I was going to make a big batch. I grabbed the bottom one, a scooper and the now-empty cardboard box the corn had been delivered in that morning. I laid my knapsack on one of the stainless-steel prep tables, fished the gloves out, put them on and headed back out the door.
The Chagrin River’s two waterfalls bisected our little town. The twenty-foot-high waterfall that ran just out back of our family business was the larger. It had once powered nine different mills, and the industrialization of the early twentieth century that swept our little neck of the woods could be ascribed to it.
On our side of the road, getting up close and personal to the falls wasn’t easy. Right next to the shop was a wooden-planked overlook that housed a seating area and a plaque with the village’s history, which gave way to a series of stairs and a boardwalk. The boardwalk was as close as you got to the falls. But any kid who grew up in Chagrin Falls could tell you that if you wanted to get to the falls, you didn’t use the stairs.
And from being a kid, I knew that’s where you’d find the best unadulterated snow. At the bottom of the falls.
I went around to the front of the shop, headed down North Main Street just past the overlook, and turned onto Bell Street. There was a lookout there just beyond a hill, covered sparsely with trees, the earth beneath uneven due to erosion. All of it now covered with snow.
I tore the box I’d brought at one of the seams, tossed it on the ground and flattened out the top and the bottom of it with my feet. I was going to use it to get to the bottom, my own homemade sled. I could walk back up, but going down was tricky.
I sat down on the box, the bowl and scooper in my lap, and gave myself a push.
I smiled all the way down. It was just as much fun as when I was ten.
Hopping up once I hit the bottom, or close enough to it to make my way down to the water’s edge, I took off toward the start of the falls. It hadn’t been cold long enough for the water to freeze, but I knew it would be better the closer I got to the origin.
I finally found the right spot, and as I bent over to shovel up my first scoopful, I heard a rustling to the side of me. It started off with a thud and lasted a couple seconds longer than I thought it should.