I’ve been to far too many funerals in the last couple of years. For most of us who grew up in Western Maryland, we eat after funerals – at somebody’s house. There is always a room somewhere close by with fried chicken from AC&T, cold cuts, casseroles, a coffee urn – and somebody usually brings ham. It’s soul food.
But there’s never any ice cream.
I think we file ice cream under celebration. Birthday parties, summer cones – the thing you reward a kid with. I don’t know, maybe ice cream feels wrong after a funeral; it’s too bright for the room?
But I’ve watched ice cream, in particular, do the opposite of celebration for years. Maybe we don’t have it right. Sometimes ice cream isn’t the party; sometimes ice cream nourishes our souls, and we leave it at home on exactly the day the soul has nothing left to eat.
In the last two years, my family has lost two women who loved ice cream – my grandmother and my mother-in-law.
Maureen and Leslie didn’t know about the little stand on the National Pike in Clear Spring called Sweetsies’ Eats & Treats, but it’s a place our family goes now – and it’s a place where we can remember our loved and lost.
Maureen Loved Chocolate Ice Cream
My beloved grandmother, Maureen Hann, my mother’s dearly departed mother, would eat ice cream at any hour, in any season, under any circumstance.
Maureen’s favorite ice cream: a small chocolate cup of anything. That was her order.
When Maureen was well on in her Alzheimer’s journey, and when it had taken most of what it was going to take, the ice cream stayed. There were stretches when it was the one thing she would still eat – the one thing that still reached her. You learn, in those years, to stop grieving the large losses all at once and to start guarding the small things that survive.
For our family, the thing that survived for Maureen was her chocolate ice cream. It made her happy. It made us happy to see her happy.
Maureen entered memory care in Washington County in the spring of 2023. She passed away last year, on July 16. She was 92.
A Milestone Birthday, A Funeral – But No Ice Cream
My grandfather, Carroll Richard Hann, went first. We lost Pap on December 22, 2020, in the thick of everything that year was. He and his bride, Maureen, had been married sixty-nine years.
They were the best.
Here’s the part I still cannot hold all the way in my hands. We laid my grandmother, Maureen, to rest on what would have been Pap’s hundredth birthday – July 23, 2025.
Both of them rest at Rest Haven now, where they held both their funerals. After Maureen’s funeral, family and friends gathered at my step-grandmother’s home, just around the corner from Rest Haven. There was food – all kinds of food. Pies. Fried chicken. Sweets. We gathered. We ate. We remembered Maureen – together, as family and friends tend to do at those moments.
But we didn’t have ice cream that day.
In our family, every birthday was a Dairy Queen cake. I’m not kidding – every single birthday. It’s the best! And the place our family went for birthdays, the one place the whole small family could always agree on, the one that was good for everybody and close to home – “The Fireside,” over by the mall. If Pap had been alive for his hundredth birthday, that is where we would have been, I bet you, followed by a Boston Red Sox-decorated Dairy Queen cake, at Glenside, after dinner at the Fireside.
Instead, on the 23 of July last year, it was Maureen’s funeral, on Pap’s 100th birthday – and nobody thought to bring the one thing that had defined every celebration we ever had?
I don’t say that to indict anyone. We were doing the best that grief allows. I say it because I only saw it later – the way you only ever see these things later when the memories of loss cut the deepest.
That Friday Before Driving to Florida (June 2024)
Two years ago, on a warm Friday in June, my mom and stepdad took me to an ice cream stand near their new home.
I didn’t know it yet – but that Friday was the last still evening before the hardest drive of my life.
Earlier that day, my wife, Kim, learned her mother, Leslie, wasn’t going to recover. She had suffered a massive heart attack the day before Mother’s Day in May 2024. That Sunday, my son and I left Gaithersburg for a long, one-day trek to Florida to join Kim, who had flown from D.C. to Sarasota on Mother’s Day 2024. Josh and I drove to Florida in one sitting – sixteen-plus hours – to ensure our family was together – to grieve together, to love one another.
We moved Leslie from Sarasota’s hospital to a Tidewell Hospice home in Port Charlotte, just a block away from Leslie’s home.
Leslie Large died on Father’s Day, June 16, 2024. She was too young – 78. We held Leslie’s funeral on Friday, June 28, in Reisterstown, Md., where my wife grew up and where Kim’s late parents built a life together. A Baltimore girl marries a Western Maryland boy. Now that’s a story.
After Leslie’s funeral, we gathered at the Harryman House in Reisterstown. Leslie spent a big chunk of her life in Reisterstown before she and her late husband, Fred, my wife’s father, moved to Florida for good in 2016.
We ate good that Friday afternoon at the Harryman House, which is now closed. Family and friends joined us. The food was always good there.
Now that I think about it, we didn’t have ice cream after Leslie’s funeral, either.
What I’ve Learned About Grief in Two Years – There’s No Straight Line
Here is the thing nobody tells you about grief: it doesn’t move in a straight line; it’s not linear.
You don’t work through it and come out the far side. You have months where you’re okay – head down, focused on the next thing, building a new adventure, and you start to believe you might have handled it.
And then something small reaches in and pulls the whole thing back up at once.
It has been a whirlwind of a year so far: I was in a major car accident in late February. Our cat, Oreo, died suddenly on the last day of March. I broke my foot on April 19, had surgery subsequently on the 22nd, and have been on crutches for the last month and a half.
Now Memorial Day has come and gone. I took my wife on a date last Friday to the annual Great Boonsboro Carnival – because that’s what you do around Washington County in the spring.
So there I was – seated at a table at the ‘ol Boonsboro Carnival. I had bought a country ham sandwich, like usual – nice and salty, the way I like it! Kim got the fries.
The Cruisers took the stage shortly after we sat down to eat. The band began playing “Make the World Go Away.”
That song – that was my grandfather’s song. Eddy Arnold sang it best. It was the one song Pap played constantly on his Alexa – the one song he’d sing at the top of his lungs so that you could hear him from the living room.
I hadn’t braced for “it” – because you never brace for “it.” I was sitting at a picnic table at a crowded carnival that I’d been going to for thirty-five years or more. Imagine me holding a country ham sandwich in my right hand, tears running down my face.
The grief came back up all at once: Maureen and her small chocolate ice cream; Pap singing in his living room, and Leslie’s heart attack that changed our world.
And my wife, Kim – she knew what it meant to me. She always knows what to do in these tough moments. Because grief is every bit a part of Kim’s life, now with both her parents gone. Kim gently reached for my hand and whispered in my ear, “He’s telling you he’s here, and that it’s okay.”
I couldn’t hide behind stoicism any longer; the tears were real. It hit hard. I tried to make sure that nobody saw me. But they were there.
And then I did the thing I always do with grief – I write. That is my go-to. When the grief surfaces like that, out of nowhere, on an ordinary Friday, writing is how I hold it long enough to set it down again. This story is some of that. The outlet – you know? It helps.
Sweetsies – the Clear Spring Ice Cream Stand Everybody Knows About
The ice cream stand from that warm Friday in June two years ago – Sweetsies. Every time we say the name, we say it with a little laugh. It’s a great name! My mom and stepdad live close to Sweetsies, off Broadfording, in a house that is not the home on Diane Drive in Halfway where I grew up. They sold that home about three years ago. Wow, I miss that home.
But going to Sweetsies with family today – I feel like I’m eight years old again. But man, I’m 40, with every ache and pain that ties me into that age bracket. These kinds of local places, like Sweetsies, become the glue that keeps the memories together for families like mine. They aren’t museums; nobody curates them. Places like Sweetsies sit on the road doing their honest work, scooping the next family’s cones. They become time machines for the families who came before.
Penny Hose, who owns Sweetsies, understands this better than I do, because she lived the other side of it. She’s a lifelong Washington County woman. Decades ago, she was a kid on a bicycle on that same stretch of road, when it was still called Ridge Road, stopping at a gas station where her ice cream stand now stands, filling a small can for the family mower. The spot from her own childhood became the business she built. She didn’t inherit a building, but she did return to a feeling and made it into a place.
She buys her beef from nearby processors, and she keeps Wilson’s Store going, which sits directly behind Sweetsies.
You know, a lot of Clear Spring High School kids have worked their first jobs inside that little ice cream shop on “Old 40”; they learn the things you can only learn by handing a stranger their change and getting it right, and they carry those things into whatever they become. It is the kind of place you drive back to first when you haven’t been home in twenty years, before you see the old house, before you see anyone – because the ice cream stand will still know you.
That is the best of America, and it has a walk-up window. Not the monuments. The stands.
All the Places Are Gone but This One
Here is what I didn’t see until I started writing it down. The places that held my people are mostly gone now.
The Big Dipper, where we made the family pilgrimage when I was a kid, still stands on Virginia Avenue. But it feels different without Memaw and Pap there. The house on Diane, where I grew up, now belongs to another family. The Fireside in Hagerstown is still there, but the birthdays we celebrated there aren’t coming back; the people whose birthdays we had there are gone. Every place of import to me, in Washington County, that once held a person – it now mostly holds an absence.
And somewhere in this hard, whirlwind year, without anyone deciding it, Sweetsies is a place I can go to remember what it felt like to be a kid growing up in the ’90s in Washington County, eating ice cream on a warm, summer night.
It’s not a replacement. You can’t replace the Big Dipper any more than you can replace a grandfather.
But maybe a successor? Yeah, I think so.
A new picnic table on a new road, where our remaining family enjoys an ice cream cone and makes memories. My mom and stepdad live minutes away now. We go. We order. We talk about the people who loved ice cream while we are having ice cream, and the having and the remembering turn out to be the same motion. That is the quiet trick of small-town ice cream shops: they allow you to grieve and enjoy your life in the same minute, and they never make you choose.
What the Ice Cream Was Always About
Maureen would take the small chocolate when she would take nothing else. Leslie loved ice cream until the very end. The Cruisers played Pap’s song on a Friday night, and I wept at a carnival where I won my first goldfish in the early ’90s.
It all runs through the same place now. So I keep coming back to the rooms after the funerals. We fed the grief. We forgot the comfort. We brought everything except the one thing that had nourished these souls when nothing else could get through.
I don’t know why we leave out ice cream from funerals? Maybe because we decided long ago that ice cream is for joy, and we cannot imagine joy in a room with sorrow and mourning.
But I think, maybe, we have the order backward.
The ice cream was never about the joy. It was about who was at the picnic table with you, and who used to be, and the strange grace of a thing sweet enough to be worth living for even on the days you are not sure you want to.
This summer, I’ll be at Sweetsies – on some gold-lit evening, maybe still on crutches, if I have to be, ordering a small chocolate cup that my grandmother would have approved of, my wife beside me, my parents close by. We’ll remember Maureen and Dick, Leslie and Fred. And we’ll make new memories. That is the whole point. We have to keep going.
And the next time we lose someone, I think I’ll bring the ice cream – to the house, to the gathering, to the quiet room full of people who do not know what to do with their hands. It’ll feel wrong for about a minute. Then somebody will take a small chocolate or vanilla and remember. Everything might be different because the person is gone – but the ice cream is the one thing that still feels “right.”
Pap used to sing it: “Make The World Go Away!” I think he was onto something – but I don’t think he fully knew it, though. Because sometimes that’s exactly what ice cream does. It makes the world go away.
For a small chocolate cup on a gold-lit evening, with the people you love beside you and the people you lost close enough to feel, it makes the world go away, just long enough to breathe.
Long enough to remember. Long enough to be all right.
Sweetsie’s is located at 14911 National Pike, Clear Spring, MD 21722.
