The assault on the memory of Peaceful Meadows continues. Lauren’s sister Lisa is in town to visit her mother, and as a former lover of Peaceful Meadows, she desperately needed to try Porn Star Farms’ ice cream to see if it was a suitable replacement. So we had Grammie and Lisa over for dinner Saturday night. We ordered a family meal of meatballs and spaghetti, and Lisa and Grammie stopped at Porn Star to get a quart of m&m ice cream.
As soon as we finished spaghetti, Lisa broke out the ice cream. When she cracked it open, she exclaimed, “Wow, look at all the colors! So many m&ms!”
“Right?!” said Lauren. “It’s so great!”
I watched passively and said, “Here’s the thing. We stopped and got stuff there just after they opened, and on the way home, Lauren said, ‘All right, I’m gonna say it. Porn Star Farms is better than Peaceful Meadows.’ And with that, she trashed twenty years of our history.”
Lisa laughed and her first spoonfuls. “It is really good.”
“Lauren tried to tell me that Peaceful Meadows tasted like hay,” I said. “Never said that once in twenty years, and now she just made it up.”
“It was very good,” Lauren said. “It just had this little taste.”
“She’s kinda right,” said Lisa. “Peaceful Meadows tasted kind of earthy, which I actually loved.”
“What?” I said.
“Yeah,” said Grammie. “It was like, I don’t know, kinda gamey.”
“Gamey?” I said.
“Not gamey,” Lisa said. “Earthy. Like how raw milk is different from pasteurized milk.”
“I see what is happening here,” I said. “Lauren made this outlandish claim and the Elliott women all need to close ranks around her.”
“It was good ice cream,” Lauren said.
“It did not taste like hay,” I said.
“It was just kind of gamey,” said Grammie.
“That is absurd,” I said. “You can’t have gamey ice cream. Or I don’t know. Maybe you can. Maybe the milk comes from all the wild turkeys that were in the yard today. Cuz wild turkeys are way gamier than domestic turkeys. So that’s Graham’s chore. He goes out to milk the wild turkeys.”
They were all laughing now. “I did it tonight,” said Lauren. “Since you all were coming over, we needed more. They have really tiny teets.” And she held up her thumb and index finger and pinched them together.
They were all laughing hard now. “Have you tried Dobby as a backup?” said Lisa. “He has tiny teets.”
“Ok, not gamey,” said Grammie. “Just different.”
“Don’t you think it’s better?” Lauren said to Lisa.
“You watch,” I said. “Soon it won’t be good enough and she will be accosting the manager or owner to tell her to put whole m&ms in and not chop them up.”
“I do like whole m&ms,” said Lisa. “But they put so many m&ms total in this that I don’t think it’s necessary.”
“I seriously can’t believe this,” I said. “But I know where things stand now. Lauren comes up with a totally bogus hot take and the Elliott women just close ranks without missing a beat.”
All that said, feel free to verify the particulars of this story with the participants. In the same conversation, Grammie also told me, “You embellish your stories.”
“How so?” I said.
“You just do. You don’t tell things how they happened but I decided to stop trying to correct you.
“I tell them how I remember them. Maybe you remember them differently. Or wrong even.”
“Have you read Educated?” Lisa said to me.
“No, but I need to,” I said.
“You do. Soooo good,” Lisa said. “She has footnotes throughout the book where she says, ‘This is how I remember that. But XXX remembers it differently, like this.”
Which yes, I am aware of convictions being overturned and how easily false memories can be implanted. But I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Porn Star Farms makes great ice cream. Peaceful Meadows did too. It did not taste gamey, earthy, or like hay. It did not come from the milk of wild turkeys. Don’t believe the Elliott Mafia if they tell you otherwise. They are now creating false memories.
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