With a hamburger-patterned mask on, Ryan Smith, 9, arrived first on a scooter. His younger brother, Gavin, followed on a bike.
Upon their arrival, Pauline Redmond, who had been sitting and waiting for customers in the driveway of her Caledonia area home, scooped freshly-chopped ice into two cones and drizzled the flavored syrup of their choosing over them. Ryan picked banana; Gavin picked cherry.
The Smith brothers are two of the regulars at Redmond’s free snow cone stand she set up in front of her own house with her husband, Don Redmond. Whenever the couple throws a snow cone event in the neighborhood, they put out posters and send out Facebook posts ahead of time.
Upon receiving notifications, neighbors — kids and adults alike — will sometimes line up at her driveway for the snow cones, Pauline said. Some linger for a while and come back to her stand asking for a different flavor. Some stay, she said, just to enjoy hanging out with the neighbors on the front lawn.
“I have a huge yard where they can all talk and hang out and stuff, and slurp on the snow cones if they need to,” she said. “One kid came by, …he says, ‘I haven’t had a snow cone in about 18 years.’ He was like, 9 years old. (He said) ‘You know what? My dad hasn’t had one in 1,800 years.’ I said, ‘Well, you need to have him come down and get him a snow cone. …He deserves one if he hasn’t had one in 1,800 years.'”
Pauline knows which flavored syrups really meet her standard. The brands Walmart carries, she said, are “nasty.” Instead, she said she contacted a friend in South Carolina — where her husband served in the Navy as a technician — to ship in the goods in gallons. Now, she has bottles of lime, cherry and banana-flavored syrups to choose from.
While her husband served, Pauline, who assumed the role of command ombudsman on base, also used to make snow cones for her fellow residents. She decided to pick those skills back up this summer, she said, after the pandemic struck the nation, leaving children in her neighborhood stranded at home without many activities. She hopes the snow cones — a summer delicacy to quench the thirst — create a space for the neighbors to connect with each other again.
“At a time of isolation,” Pauline said, “I want to get them to come out and meet each other, see each other. We wave at each other and say hi as they come by, that’s about it. I want them to feel comfortable with everybody, let other people know that you’ve got kids the same age as they do.”
Besides snow cones, Pauline also taught her neighborhood children to make ornaments out of ceramics modules, an event she called “Christmas in July.” She would leave them directions along with the pre-packaged materials, she said, such as non-toxic paint and glitters.
“Kids like Christmas, period,” she said. “Their hands are kind of tied right now. They don’t understand at this point why they can’t go to the park, why they can’t go to the movies and things like that, but they want to go do something.”
Seeing children’s faces lit up by accomplishing a task by themselves, Pauline said, makes her just as happy. The faces remind her of the time when she taught children as a part-time art teacher while working as a paramedic between 1977 and 2000 in different cities in South Carolina. That was her coping mechanism, she said, to decompress.
“All the things we would see, and sometimes hours, was nerve-wracking,” Pauline said. “That gave me an outlet to relax and calm my mind, and at the same time see joy (from) those little faces whenever they finish the project.”
Art, Pauline said, knows no right or wrong. She said she hopes children will understand that any form of art can be beautiful.
“(Art is) to make them understand that there’s more to this world and you can find it in many ways,” Pauline said. “Kids get so upset, ‘I made a mistake.’ … Art is no mistake. Everything in art can be fixed. If you are happy with it, that’s all that matters.”
Yue Stella Yu was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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