The morning is hot. It is already 81˚, the predicted high for the day, but the house is still comfortably cool from the night air. The small breeze is refreshing. Today is a summer day.

When I was a kid, the Sunday morning walk to church was a joy on a day like today. Sometimes I skipped. Sometimes I stopped to check out a garden and to smell the flowers. Most times I went downstairs for mass, but I’d stay upstairs if it was crowded. That meant standing in the back or sitting on the steps, the only ways to go to mass without going. I was never especially devout.

I remember being sticky in the summer. Watermelon juice from wide slices always rolled down my arms. My cheeks too got sticky with juice, but I never cared. I thought it a small price to pay for sweet watermelon. Ice cream in cones has a short life. You either lick the scoop fast or it melts down your hand then down your arm, more summer stickiness. Hoodsies were the only exception. You ate those with a wooden spoon. Only the abandoned melted.

We all wore the same styles in the summer, shorts and a blouse, sometimes a sleeveless blouse cut to the shoulder. I always got a weird tan starting at the bottoms of the sleeves then down to my wrists. My father always called that a trucker’s tan.

Lunch time in the summer was casual, unplanned. On my bicycle excursions, I’d bring a lunch and eat it at some neat stop under the trees. Sometimes I’d make a sandwich at home and eat it on the steps, back or front steps made no difference. I’d bring a lunch when we went to the pool. My lunches were never imaginative. The bread was Wonder Bread, soft and white. The meat was bologna, cut from a roll and never with a straight cut. The slice usually had one thick side and one thin side. I added cut hot peppers then the final elements, a slice of that orange cheese and dollops of yellow mustard. It was a great sandwich.

I still love sandwiches and mine have become more imaginative. My bread is seldom white unless it is a baguette, a favorite of mine for sandwiches, but I’m not really partial to one bread or the other. I add all sorts of stuff like avocados, tomatoes, bacon, pears or apples, different cheeses and different mustards. I still eat bologna sandwiches but each slice is uniform from the deli. I add cut jalapeños. Of late I had been using Sir Kensington’s Spicy Brown Mustard, but I ran out and haven’t been able to find it but no worries there. I easily switched to fig jam.

My childhood sandwich has become a bit sophisticated, but, I notice, all in all, it is still a bologna sandwich.