I hope you can do something to make your family feel better!

1) "sun blazed brilliantly" - this is understood, and it makes sense, but it sounds very, very poetic (speaking as an American). 2) I suggest along->down because, as a preposition, "along" generally describes motion near something, and not really on top of it. For example, you might walk "along a river" because you wouldn't stand on/in the river itself. 3) This is debatable, but I think "ice cream" is generally used as an uncountable noun, so I think it sounds best to use a unit of measure when talking about it. 4) In the sentence about "licking spoons", "spoons" will generally take an article or possessive pronoun. I think it's obvious that the spoons are your spoons, but... there's something subtle here that seems missing if you were to leave them out, though I can't describe it. 5) Meemaw is a valid word, though it's generally only used in certain dialects (Google mentions the southern region of the US). 6) A last subtle correction - especially because you contracted "I'm" in the previous sentence, I think it's better to contract "I'm" as often as possible. Of course, these contractions can be broken up, and as a rule of thumb, I think we generally only separate the contractions in short, emphatic sentences. Good job on this!