This is Kelly (left) and Tracey (right) at the ice cream truck. In New Hampshire. And I made them pose for the picture because the ice cream truck in New Hampshire is one of our favorite stories from the kids’ childhood. It goes like this…
My parents have a cabin across the street (this is the street in the pic) from a lake in – you guessed it – New Hampshire. They live in Georgia most of the year but come up for the summers to escape the heat. Which is nice, because we get to see them.
When the kids were little and I had gone back to work, my parents used to take them for a week in the summer. Good times. The kids loved it.
The front of the cabin is a big screen porch. My mom had a bucket of toys there from our childhood. One of them was an old Bugs Bunny jack-in-the-box. It was so old that Bugs no longer had any ears. But the kids liked playing with it anyway. Do you remember the tinny sound those things use to make? If you don’t, it sounds something like the songs an ice cream truck plays.
Tracey LOVED the ice cream truck. The minute she heard it she was all over getting an ice cream. One day, Alex decided to fool her into thinking the ice cream truck was coming down the street using the Bugs Bunny jack-in-the-box.
He turned the crank and watched what Tracey, who was across the street with a friend, would do.
The minute she heard the noise she froze in her tracks, on alert, looking for that truck.
I’m told that Alex and all the witnesses on the porch – my mom, my dad, and Kelly – burst into a fit of giggles. Tracey, good sport that she is, likes this story, too. And I’m pretty sure she got an ice cream that day, because the truck driver knew he had a good customer waiting for him.
Still does.