It takes my breath away how a place almost 900 miles from where I grew up can hold such vivid, beautiful and heartbreaking memories. Maybe it is the regularity of it. As certainly as spring arrives, we make the trek to northern Florida. Over sixteen years, our family has grown, we have spread out further and further across the country, and our schedules have diversified; but still, we meet at the Gulf with tenacity.
Years ago, I would spend the night before our trip making sandwiches. The way I remember it is endless rows of rolls that needed to sawed in half, the crumbs going everywhere. Armed with a large jar of Hellmans and a butter knife, I would slap mayonnaise on the top half of each roll. Faced with such a mundane task, my imagination ran wild. As I put mayonnaise on roll after roll after roll, I was struck that, "the mayonnaise quivered expectantly."
So thrilled was I with this description of making sandwiches, that I put down my knife, ran to my room and wrote it down. As though there was a chance someone might steal it. I don't know what I thought the mayonnaise was expecting. Perhaps the anticipation of sharing its existence with shaved turkey was almost more than it could take?
