My first successful business

This may surprise you, but as a child I was a young entrepreneur and had my own ice cream shop. Okay, so maybe I’m stretching the truth. I owned it joint custody with my older sister. At our ice cream shop you could order one of two flavors, with a variety of different toppings. You could order vanilla, but it tasted like sand, or you could order chocolate, but it tasted like sand. You could have chocolate chips mixed in, but it mostly tasted like small rocks. You could have mint, but it mostly tasted like the leaves of a Maple tree. Our ingredients may have come from Mother Nature, but the cups were real plastic. 

We opened our shop up in the middle of a Maple tree. The tree split into three sections from the ground up, so you could sort of stand in the middle of it and the drive through window was essentially the open space between the trees. One employee could only work at a time, because the standing space wasn’t big enough for both a manager and a trainee. Our need for few employees contributed to our high profits. What made this tree “the ice cream tree” was its unique dispensing properties. There was a natural hole in the tree where you could fill it with sand, and then it would come out the other end. We would create a delicious mixture that would have rivaled Cold Stone, shove it down the tree hole, and then dispense it into cups to sell to our happy customers.

            Since we lived in the country with not another child in sight for three miles (all of our direct neighbors were old and drank grape juice), we mostly sold ice cream to each other, our imaginary friends, and to our parents when we could convince them to come by. We accepted payment in the form of Maple leaves. A typical cone cost three leaves.

            Shortly after my sister and I moved away from home, the ice cream tree had to be chain sawed in half, much like our hearts. The tree was two feet away from the corner of my dad’s shop, and its height was becoming a problem. Luckily for us, he cut a seven foot high stump, so most of the actual shop still remains. The tree bark of the former dispenser has grown in, and the tri-trunks have expanded in girth, making it near impossible for an employee to stand in the middle, unless you are the size of a bean pole. Those memories are still as sweet as sprinkles, though.