We were all brought home by the forces of change and upheaval. Sad upheaval, and happy upheaval - upheaval nonetheless. Amy, my friend with the sharp one-liners, had lost a grandmother she grew up with; and Matt, my friend with the defining ideals, was marrying off a sister he didn’t grow up with. Though we are normally separated at least one degree by geography, and at least six degrees by our schedules, we were brought home for the weekend by these forces of change. If this were a movie, we would’ve stayed up all night in a Victorian house revealing ages-old secrets and crying and laughing and changing our lives. There would’ve been at least one pillow fight, at least two Natasha Beddingfield montages, and a dark and handsome stranger.
Sadly, though, the actual weekend was devoid of handsome strangers.
What the weekend was not devoid of were our constants – humor and friendship. We were also supposed to have a day at the beach, but the NY bartender cramped our start time and the evening-workout junkie cramped our end time. A trio as motley as ours is used to such conflicting demands, though. We easily altered our plans to a leisurely ice cream trip, as if we’d suspected all along that our divergent tendencies would blow them off course. After all, some things change…and some things remain the same.
To make the trip as leisurely as we could, we decided to roam past our high school haunts (Dairy Queen and Peaceful Meadows) to Farfar’s Danish Ice Cream in Duxbury. Like many things that are in Duxbury, Farfar’s has the reputation to be both nice and a little bit overrated. It’s located on a classically New England street full of rolling hills and white trim and Duxbury’s version of a mini-mall – a few shingled shops settled on the white cloud of a seashell driveway. The trip from Matt’s family’s house in Whitman gave us the perfect amount of time to talk smack about high school classmates’ ascents and descents and our own ascents and descents. It was so nice to drive through classic New England scenes on a sunny summer day, with two friends who make me feel lucky that I ever met them. It put me in the mood for dairy.
Lucky for me, there was dairy in abundance inside the shop. Farfar’s claims to be “Homemade Danish Ice Cream.” What is Danish ice cream, you ask? Well, I have no idea. I would’ve asked the fresh-faced high school girls behind the counter, but they were already openly irritated with my indecisive tendencies, and I’ve been on the wrong side of tempermental high school scoopers in the past. I didn’t want to push my luck. A google search and short burst of Wikipedia trolling were similarly uninformative. I’ll just have to guess that it’s a marketing ploy….or that the cows wear wooden clogs.
But anyway, after sampling the peppermint stick and banana, I decided that I really liked the peppermint. And then I ordered the chocolate. Because – I don’t know, it just kind of happened. I think that sometimes I get too worked up and suffer from a mild form of Ice Cream Tourette’s…The chocolate was good, though. Good, but not great. The texture was on the heavier side, though still silky. The flavor wasn’t overpoweringly chocolate-y, which I think I might have preferred. I spent most of the time envying Amy’s peppermint stick, and then swooping in on her melting remains when she was too full to continue. I had no interest whatsoever in Matt’s banana, which tasted cloyingly like overripe bananas. It reminded me of fruit flies.
The ice cream was good, but the best part of Farfar’s is the ambiance. Like I mentioned, the shop sits in a white-trimmed cluster of buildings. It has a farmer’s porch and Americana-style banners on the front windows. There are chalkboards and quaint signs, and a few scattered tables inside. Though it was tame on our visit, you can tell the shop gets really busy because the counter is clearly set up to handle an onslaught of South Shore residents on a rampage for lactose. All of these aspects of Farfar’s pale in comparison to the store’s real gem: a brick patio out back with seating for at least 5 different groups of people, though I’m sure it accommodates much more than that on warm summer nights.
Matt, Amy, and I sat at one of the outdoor tables for at least an hour. No one hustled us out, or questioned why we would roost there for so long. It gave us time to catch up on all that had happened that weekend, and to plan for the future. Amy, the friend I consider “most likely to bring snacks in her purse,” asked Matt and I (“most likely to bring a flask” and “most likely to lose her keys 13 times on the way out the door”) where we’d like to go for an upcoming getaway. We answered at the same time.
“India.” – Matt
“Burlington, Vermont?” – Bridget the Dork
Can we go to India in a weekend? Um, no. Do I have any explanation as to the appeal of Burlington, Vermont? Um, no again. But both the question and the answers were a snapshot of our three disparate personalities. The laughing self-awareness that followed these foolish answers was a snapshot of how these personalities come together, and the reasons I believe we’ll stay together, in spite of our divergent paths. There will always be forces of change and upheaval, but there are also forces of constancy. In my case, two of those forces – friendship and ice cream – were on glorious display that sunny Sunday.
The New Yorker, the Danish Ice Cream Shop, and the Duxbury strip mall.
Well, it says it's Danish, so I guess it is.....
Sticky elbows - occupational hazard of eating ice cream and Amy's life in general.
Apparently, Matt doesn't mind eau de fruitfly.
[...] our cones. The ice cream’s texture was perfect – not whipped, like Farfar’s or 4 Seas – but not so dense as the Ben and Jerry’s that subconsciously inspired me – a [...]