Selma's

When I was a little girl I often went on car rides, for entertainment, with my grandparents. I have so many memories of those times, sitting between them in the big red truck with the camper on the back. It was a glorious time.

When Ron and I were first dating we went on a car ride through the hills of Afton, MN. When he drove through the town I immediately recognized the little ice cream parlor as Selma's, the place that my grandparents would stop on some of these various rides. Selma's had been around since the early 1900s, when the place was established in an existing nineteenth-century wooden clapboard building. It is thought to be the oldest ice cream parlor in Minnesota.

I told Ron that we must stop for ice cream. I got Maple Nut, not because it was my favorite but because it's what my grandpa would have ordered. And on my way out of Selma's licking my maple nut cone, the tears started to fall. I shared with Ron the good memories I had of ice cream at Selma's with my grandparents, walking to the park across the street to enjoy our cones on the park benches.

 A couple years later Selma's went dark. The owners couldn't afford the little parlor anymore and it went into foreclosure and then purchased by a bank. The building was for sale with an asking price of $299,000. Of course I romanticized about buying the shop and serving up ice cream for a living, raising my family at Selma's.

This year it was purchased at cleaned up and opened by a new family. The grand opening was this weekend and I thought it was so fitting to load the kids up in the car for ice cream at Selma's and a drive through Afton, so that's what we did. We asked the grandmas to join us and I had a wonderful time going down memory lane again. And the kids... well the kids, they enjoyed the ice cream! Addie tasted multiple flavors deciding that chocolate was her favorite and Jackson was perfectly happy with his "Superman" ice cream flavor.