My grandpa Bill loves ice cream. Every time we would visit him throughout my childhood he would always make a moment for the sweet treat, whether it was a banana split complete with hot fudge and peanuts or a trip to the local Dairy Queen where he would get a hot fudge sundae or a milkshake. Ice cream was his love language, and he didn’t phone it in when we’re talking about making it a ritual—he always had all the toppings at hand should the moment call for it. He is the sort of man who gives things like ice cream a little extra thought and I always appreciated that about him.

And so, I was thinking about him today as I made my way back to the condo after one of my last radiation treatments here in Rochester. A friend sent me a gift card to an ice cream place with a note that instructed me to get a little treat as I finished up my last week. It was such a kind gesture, and I put the gift card in my purse, thinking maybe I’d save it for the next time we were in a big town with the kids. For some reason, grabbing an ice cream by myself didn’t seem like something I was going to do, especially since the last few days had me feeling a little more sick and a little more emotionally drained, despite the promise of the end in sight.

Anyway, maybe it was the sun-shiney, almost 70-degree afternoon that changed my mind and gave me an actual, grampa-like craving for ice cream, or maybe it was my friend’s note and the gift card in my purse, but suddenly I was overcome by the certainty that a chocolate milk shake would cure me, and so I made the stop.

I had a similar feeling when the girls were here visiting me a few weeks back. Rosie wasn’t feeling well, so it left my oldest daughter and I to our own devices. And what does a mom and her ten-year-old daughter do on a beautiful day with no real agenda? You get ice cream and sit at the picnic table with an umbrella and listen as the girl talks. I thought about my grandpa that day too, how he would love the place with its dozens and dozens of ice cream flavors and how he would probably just order a hot fudge sundae or, like me, a chocolate milkshake, despite the endless options. I watched my daughter spoon tiny bites of her strawberry cheesecake flavor to her mouth while she talked about friends and basketball, and I could tell she was feeling special and grown up hanging out, just her and I. There’s a different way your kids act when you find it’s just the two of you. I think, somehow, both of us can be much more ourselves this way. I could have sat there forever I think, frozen in that space where we were together and we were just fine, and the sun was warm and the ice cream was delicious.

Back home, as part of our work in the arts, we also run a Visitor’s Center store called The Merc that scoops up six different flavors of hard ice cream. Whenever my mom picks her grandkids up from school they wind up there, sampling the new flavors and negotiating bigger scoops. The Merc is that place for a lot of grammas and grandpas, an easy way to do something special together.

And we have our regulars in the community who come to sit together at the tables or on the deck on a sunny day, and then those who always make it a stop on their way through town. For some time, there was a man who came almost every day for one scoop, well dressed with time for a visit, because ice cream is only half of it. And then once, when I was working behind the counter, a young man came through the drive-through and ordered a vanilla cone. I might have asked him a question about a double scoop or if he wanted anything else, and he replied by telling me the cone was for his dog, who was laying in the backseat of his pickup. She was sick and he was giving her one last treat. I couldn’t stop the tears when I handed him the ice cream and told him it was on the house.

What am I trying to say here? Something profound about ice cream? Yes, maybe I am. That there are simple things like the coveted chokecherry flavor that only your favorite place has, or the way I know what my husband would order even before makes the choice. There’s something  purely human about sharing a double scoop or offering up a taste or trying to soften a bad day with something so simple. Or whenever you chose chip and mint or cookie dough, you think of who you were on the front porch of your childhood home and maybe you can smell the fresh cut lawn or the clover.

Or maybe you take a sip of that milkshake to give yourself a little reprieve from a hard day because your friend loved you enough to suggest it could help. And you think of your grandpa then, and how he once drove you across the Midwest to play music because he didn’t think you should go all those miles alone and there was always a diner with a sundae waiting for the two of you along the way.

I paid for my milkshake and as I headed out the door, the teenage boy who was sitting at the table behind me shuffled up to the counter where a pretty girl was working her after school job, hell bent on continuing the flirting I had interrupted with my order, and I was glad to see that teenagers are still teenagers the same way ice cream stays ice cream. And I hope they fall in love…