Once upon a night

By Christine Tailer
HCP columnist
 
I often wonder as I pass by folks in town what stories they could tell of growing up in the country. I grew up in the city where there wasn’t even any space between the houses, and blades of grass were few and far between. By the time I was a young teenager, my parents thought it best to get me out of the city. A girl’s boarding school on top of a mountain seemed the perfect place. What trouble could I get into there? Off I went.

“Psst, you guys awake?” Someone was at our dorm window. 

“Who’s there?” my roommate asked the darkness.

“It’s me,” our visitor said. “It’s beautiful out. Let’s go. The others are waiting.”

It was about one in the morning on a clear spring night on top of Skiff Mountain. I got out of bed, instantly wide awake, and removed the window screen. Our visitor hopped inside our ground floor room. Living on the lower level of the dorm had its definite advantages. 

As my roommate and I put on our boots, our guest explained what was up. Apparently, she and two under formers had realized that they hadn’t cared for dinner that night and were still ravenously hungry. We were going to do something about that. We were going to raid the dining hall. The weather was warm. The stars were out. It was going to be an ice cream night.

We left our dorm, staying in the shadows as we moved through the darkness. We had to cross campus, but a direct route would have been foolish. The night watchman was old and slow, but there was no reason to court disaster. So, we skirted the rear of the dorms, flitting quickly across the circles of floodlit ground that separated each building. We met up with the two other girls outside of their dorm, and then continued our shadowed journey over to the dining hall.

The night watchman was nowhere in sight. His patrol usually kept him over at the school house until 2 a.m. or so. We had plenty of time to get inside, gather our dessert and depart into the dark. None of the doors on campus was ever locked that I can recall. We simply needed to walk into the main dining hall, head past the quiet tables, already set for breakfast, and enter the back door to the kitchen. Once in the kitchen we would pass behind the food line and gather up our ice cream prize and a few eating utensils.

We entered the kitchen and went straight to the freezer, a cold storage room with a heavy steel door. We stepped inside, scanned our choices, and unanimously settled on an unopened five-gallon cardboard container of chocolate. One of us gathered up the ice cream container and wrapped it in a towel she had brought to contain the cold as she carried it. I grabbed a handful of spoons, and we were out the door and into the night. 

We circled around toward the schoolhouse behind the small red chapel and climbed over the stone wall. We gathered in a close circle around the cardboard container as we pried off the lid. I handed out the spoons and we dug in. The night’s light glinted on our utensils as we scraped and ate. With time, the scraping became less vigorous. The ice cream softened and our bellies filled. About half way through the canister we fell back into the grass, one by one. Only our late-night visitor remained eating, the chocolate smeared across her moonlit face.

“Come on you guys. Don’t waste this stuff. Just pummel it on down into those tummies of yours. You can do it. I know you can.” 

One by one, we sat back up, groaning, and began to eat again. It was tough, slow work, but we made steady progress. We ate as a team. The bottom was in sight. We were almost there. Again, we fell back onto the warm spring ground, not able to move, barely able to talk. Our leader scraped the bottom of the ice cream barrel clean.  

“I knew you guys could do it,” she said.

The next morning, as we dressed in our uniform skirts, we all left the zippers and clasps open. Our still full bellies needed a bit of extra breathing space.

Christine Tailer is an attorney and former city dweller who moved several years ago, with her husband, Greg, to an off-grid farm in south-central Ohio. Visit them on the web at straightcreekvalleyfarm.com.