D’Iberville Sno-Ball is a Pepto Bismol–pink hut on an unpaved lot, the kind of shop that you can drive by thirty times and never know if it’s still in business. Its matching hand-painted sandwich board leans against a telephone pole all year round. Last weekend, I noticed it sitting two feet away from where it normally is, as subtle a vital sign as there can be.
Chances are it’s still cold where you are. But way down in south Mississippi, where it’s 75 and sunny already, sitting down with a cup of shaved ice drenched in liquid diabetic shock sounds like a fine idea.
At the window, I was direct: “I’ve never had one of these before. Tell me what to do.” Right away, Team Sno-Ball set upon plying me with fluffy spoonfuls of ice topped with their favorite syrups—blueberry cheesecake, green apple, red velvet cake—and proving that people who sell cold, sweet things always take the give-it-away-before-they-buy-it approach to business. I decided on blackberry topped with sweetened condensed milk, and watched as they packed snow with a funnel top, syrup carving rivulets and channels in the ice, a mountain eroding in fast-forward.
I sat at the bench and commenced staining my tongue a ghoulish color. Sweet and tart and cold and creamy, it was going down fine. A mother and son pulled up in their Sunday best, his tiny shirttail half untucked under his vest and tie. “What flavor did you get, little man?” I asked him.
“Sponnahb,” he said. His hands barely reached around his cup.
“What was that?”
“Sponnahb,” he said again, quietly. His mother smiled. “Spongebob,” she translated for me. I looked over at the flavor menu, 60 choices strong, three of them different subflavors of Bubble Gum. There was no Spongebob flavor. “It’s really ‘birthday cake,’” she said, almost so that he couldn’t hear. Southerners love their cake.
As the mother and son and Sponnahb drove off, I marveled at how perfectly innocent that moment was, like living a cliché of childhood. Another car drove up, aggressive, loud music thumping in the trunk. Out came two dudes your mother wouldn’t want you to hang out with. Scowls, neck tattoos and all that.
“Two large strawberries,” one drawled at the window while the other kept scowling.
“D’ya want cream on those?” the woman inside asked.
“Cream?” the drawler asked the scowler.
He looked up, eyes wide and suddenly no longer scowling. “Cream? Oh, yeah—yes, Ma’am. Cream, please.”
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