You Scream! I scream! Yoebie screams for ice cream!

By: Hannah Alwine, Contributor

Let me paint you a picture: 

It is a summer night in Oberlin. (Or pretend that it is a summer night in Oberlin. We are a college town in NorthEastern Ohio, so I am aware that true summer nights are few and far between.) In any case, it is a night in Oberlin that is slightly warmer than usual. The typical 30 degree weather has abated, if only for a moment. 

You step out of Peter’s from your Monday 7-9 pm Queer Anarcho-Feminist Surrealist Poetry class, shedding your winter layers as you go. Winter coat? No need! Crocheted beanie? Not necessary! Mittens? Your fingers can warm themselves on their own! 

You stand at the steps, debriefing with a friend about the class. You talk about anarchism. You talk about feminism. You briefly mention surrealism. You take a moment to think about poetry. The street lights are on. The twilight is a dark blue fading darker. The night air is warmed by the heat emanating up from the pavement, retaining the warmth of the day even as the sun makes her last appearance at the very edge of the horizon. You can hear spring peepers in the distance, chirping out their excitement at the sudden shift in temperature. For a moment, life is good. 

Then, the craving hits you. It's a result of the combination of warm night air and the sleepy lack of Monday night responsibilities. You want to continue the current conversation — you have finally made your way to talking about poetry! — but standing awkwardly outside of Peter’s is less than optimal. Instead, you want to continue talking over a sweet, cold treat… On this uncharacteristically warm March evening, you desperately want an ice cream cone. 

But Oberlin College, for all its academic rigor and emphasis on intellectual/artistic exploration, is severely lacking in one key aspect — it has no ice cream shop. The town of Oberlin is an ice cream dessert. There is no place in Oberlin to be confronted with an unreasonably long list of flavors with incomprehensibly complicated names. There is no place in Oberlin to sit on the curb, or the warmth of the asphalt, while you attempt to eat the frozen custard before it melts down the side of your cone. 

In short, Oberlin needs an ice cream store, desperately. 

While Oberlin has its fair share of coffee shops and restaurants, it lacks an evening place for students to gather off campus. I am personally a huge fan of Slow Train (on sunny days) and the Local (on cloudy ones) but coffee shops serve the community in a different way. They are places for productive parallel play, reading papers or doing problem sets alongside a friend. They are spaces for caffeinated small talk in the light of day.  

Ice cream stores serve a different purpose in the community, acting as places of late night communion over overly sugared dairy products. A conversation shifts when it happens beneath the street lights. People are different with ice cream cones in their hands as they reflect on the day slowly slipping away. 

The concept of “third spaces” has recently become a popular discussion topic on Instagram and TikTok. This term refers to social environments separate from the home and the workplace. While the town of Oberlin has a myriad of daytime third spaces, it lacks an evening option. 

Though it may seem antithetical to make this argument on a day when it’s so cold outside my fingers are freezing to the point of breaking off, I think that in situations such as these it is of the utmost importance to have hope. I may not have the resources or ability to jump start an Oberlin ice cream venture on my own, but still, hope remains. Hope for warmer days. Hope for colder cream. 

If we can’t imagine the world we want to live in, how are we to fight for the world we so desperately want.