The Ice House, Route 1B.

Who doesn’t love a neighborhood ice cream stand complete with small sliding windows and service from cheery collegebound teenagers and their piles of dollar bills next to their magicmarkered names. Good ice cream. Great even. Many flavors choices, a line of people three and four deep, especially in the late afternoon or early evening when it’s not quite dark but just the right time at the end of a summer one early Fall day to get an ice cream. While my favorite local go-for-a-cone place is Brown's near York’s Nubble Lighthouse, who doesn’t love a divergence? On a breathtakingly crisp Autumn drive near Portsmouth, NH along Rt.1B near New Castle I revisited The Ice House. It all there - the gravel parking lot, two to three service windows, ice cream choices that on this early Fall afternoon included Apple Crisp and Pumpkin. Moostracks? Of course. Tollhouse, yep. Coffee Kahlua Brownie, Totally Turtle, Raspberry Cheesecake and Birthday Cake, you'll find them here.

What the Ice House also has at the “outside” stand is a enormously extended list of pleasures from its inside restaurant. Temptations at the window include lobster roll, native shrimp roll, native crab melt, fried haddock, and a Spicy Boom Boom Burger ( you’ll have to make the trek to find out.) On this afternoon, my partner and I sat in the car, people watching, while digging in two large styrofoam cups of the Ice House Seafood Chowder. It’s all in there - local white fish, clams, even a few clam bellies, and lobster, in a thin milk-based broth. "Chock full" as my mother would say.  A crow sat on the overhead wires above the deck entertaining patrons with sqwaking stories of its day. So charm is included. He probably wanted the remnants of their cones, not that I can imagine he'd find any, and would wait, if not for this group of people, then the next arrivals of minivans and Mercedes. Friendly service, a picturesque spot on Route 1B, and a menu that will make you consider more than just ice cream, get to the Ice House before it closes for the season on Oct 17^th and taste their Pumpkin ice cream, spiced with ginger and nutmeg. This is what Fall drives, and ice cream stands, are all about.

Time for apples.

Just as my nose thrills in inhaling the aromas of a wine, it can't get enough of the nuances of the beginning of a season, the shift from the last one. Especially Fall. Leaves, the first tinge of woodsmoke in the neighborhood, cold air mixed with warm sun even has a scent though I don't think I can adequately describe it. And apples. Crates of fresh picked apples smell amazing. And we haven't even gotten to the baking them into pie smell yet. The first find of roadside apples takes me right back to Sunday mornings as a kid at the apple stand out at the far north stretches of Chestnut street out at the West End. By the end of the excursion, we had tasted apples and brought bags of them home. It was always sunny, with sounds of rustling leaves from an always present October wind and cars parking on the gravel lot near the trees.  Car doors slamming, kids running, it was an event. I don't remember it ever raining on the day we got to go get apples. I don't recall smelling apples as a kid but I do remember the smell of the sunporch all week after that Sunday and its bags of fresh picked Macouns, Yellow Delicious and Macintosh.

It's time for apples.