Summer Sandwich

When I was a kid, I used to make a quick snack all on my own that was a breeze to make and required very few ingredients. I'm not even going to list the ingredients here as that would give away the surprise. Here's the instructions on how to do it on your own:

1. Get two pieces of white bread.
2. Spread each slice with butter.
3. Lightly sprinkle sugar onto each slice.
4. Place sugared sides together (assemble sandwich)
5. Enjoy your "sugar sandwich"
6. Visit Dentist.
7. Pay hefty bill.

I wondered recently just why i started eating those when I was a kid as for the longest time I've always just assumed it was because I liked sugar and particularly sugar with butter. (This stems from all the lefse with butter and sugar I've eaten since birth). But then it dawned on me (seriously...all of a sudden) that I had picked up this trick and habit from my mother.

My mom would make this snack. In reality, it pretty much is just like lefse with butter and sugar. The ingredients are quite similar and it tastes very similar as well. It was an easy snack that I could run inside and make myself in the middle of the afternoon on a summer day.

Those hot summer afternoons at 905 Third Street.... where we didn't have air conditioning. We had "open windows". The routine was to wake up and as soon as the outside temperature was warmer than the inside of the house, we'd close up all the windows and pull down all the retractable blinds. We would rough it like that for years. When the sun went down and the air cooled off, the blinds were lifted and the windows opened. The cross winds would drive cooler air through the house. If a storm moved in, we'd have to close up the windows most of the way (at least on the side of the house getting the rain driven into it). The task of opening and closing the windows was often my job, but really it was up to anybody that wanted to be comfortable.

I can list the windows I had to open. The storm door on the front of the house, the door on the west side of the house, the two kitchen windows. On the second floor, there was the bathroom window, my bedroom, the windows in the sunroom, two in the master bedroom that faced north, two in Matthew's room and two in the sewing room. Then, last but not least, there was three windows up in the attic bedroom that would allow the warmest air to rise in the house and escape out the top like a chimney. We'd place fans strategically throughout the airflow of the day. Sometimes the fans would drive the air in and other days we would place the fans to draw the air out.

Eventually the "windows only" method wasn't enough to keep us cool or even comfortable and dad broke down and we put in a window unit air conditioner on the main level by the living room. There were nights in the midst of the stretches of summer heat that we would sleep downstairs. Before the window unit (and maybe this is what the deciding factor was) we spent the night at the drug store where the central air kept it very comfortable. I only remember doing that once, so maybe only once was all that dad needed to pull the trigger on a window unit.

And then eventually further, we put another window unit upstairs in the sunroom. The sunroom opens up to both the master bedroom and to my bedroom. While I was in high school and Matthew was still around, he'd sleep on the floor of my bedroom every so often in the cooler air.

All these memories stemmed from the recollection of eating sugar with butter on bread. Those hot summer days, warm nights and easy snacks... even if they weren't the healthiest snack around.