Small Town Summer Food

Summer food? Yeah, I know what you mean.

Look, Montana gets cold. I mean, tongue-stuck-to-the-flagpole cold. So you get used to soups, and stews. Potatoes, onions, carrots, biscuits, warm-your-toes, warm-your-soul, comforting, calorie-filled, dripping grease, your-momma-spent-a-long-time-on-this, so-sit-down-and-eat, food.

So when it’s time for summer, it’s time to shed the heat. I’m a watermelon gal. Cold cut sandwiches. Macaroni salad. Popsicles. Finger food.

It’s the season where you don’t wanna sit at the table, know what I mean? Gotta take it on the run. It’s summer food.

You grow up a certain way, that’s what you like. What you know. Habits stay built, memories stay linked. I think of summer and I think of grabbing a bag of chips and some skates and dashing out the door. I think of flopping on my belly early in the morning, slipping frozen grapes in my mouth while zoning out to Recess and Sabrina.

I think of ice cold pitchers of cherry red, sugar-laden kool-aid waiting on the folding table next to my BFF’s trampoline. Tossing back pixie stick powder while strolling down the tiny town Main Street, arm-in-arm with whichever friend wasn’t grounded or at the pool.

You know, that’s the thing about summer, isn’t it? The really iconic thing.

It ain’t about the food.

Maybe you munch on barbecue chicken. Stuff your face with corn. Maybe summer is the best time to find fresh raspberries to make into jam for morning toast. The best time for chowing down crispy salads for a hot summer bod.

I haven’t lived in Montana since I was young enough to not yet know that life was more than a summer afternoon. But I haven’t forgotten what went into brown sack lunches for fishing trips and day camps.

See, you grow up in Small Town America, you grow up and get out, or you grow up and wish you had. But summer food, man, that’s something that stays.

Summer food, that’s a phone call with your big sis, reminiscing about end-of-school-year Personal Pan Pizza Hut coupons.

Summer food, that’s telling your buddies about the local pop stand where you could get an icecream cone deep fried AND dipped in chocolate, all for a dime.

Summer food, that’s wishing you could have grandma’s baked beans just one more time, y’know hamburgers aren’t the same without her cackling that old rhyme beans-beans-the-magical-fruit.

Summer food, that’s when curfew is dinner. And dinner is pretty lenient because hell, it’s too damn hot to cook anyway.

It’s pooling pocket money for matinee popcorn, don’t hold back on the butter, we’re too young to care about cholesterol.

Hot dogs, drenched in ketchup. Fries in tartar sauce. Pigs in a blanket at your cousin’s house, wearing mascara a bit too thick, and lipstick a shade too bright. Sipping virgin margarita mix and acting drunk, bras stuffed with tissue.

Giving a ring pop to that boy you like. Filling up a 30 cent cup at the corner store with a little bit of every flavor, dubbing it the summer suicide, who cares if you oughta pick a better name. Quarter counting for jellybeans, and trading peanut butter cups for slim jim jerky, each transaction a serious deal carried out in the grim, stark alleyways between homes.

It’s your time capsule, you know? It’s taped and labeled with the town you were born in, the town where you learned to walk, to laugh, to run in the sprinklers. And now and again, when the sun is high and the days are long, you put on some cut off shorts, and open it up to see what’s inside.

Yeah, summer food. I know it just fine. I recognize it when I ruffle a four year old’s hair, telling her that she’s gonna grow a watermelon since she swallowed a seed. I hear it when I say pop twenty years after living in a place where everyone else says soda. I feel it when I start craving Dilly Bars and Simple Times.

Yeah, that’s summer. It never lasts for long, but it’s that small part of each and every year that we all gotta have our snow cones and milk mustaches. Go get yours, okay?