The #BlogHerWritingLab prompt today is: What dish transports you to a different place and time in your life?

A new restaurant in a small town is life-changing. When I was growing up, my small town was dominated by the local Pizza Hut in a way that hasn't been realized there before or since. All the cool kids in high school worked at Pizza Hut, and after football games we'd all head over to cram seven people into each side of the booths and try to make it out of the restaurant afterward with red plastic glasses smuggled under our sweaters for no good reason except our frontal lobes weren't fully formed.

Then, one day, a new pizza place opened on the square: Breadeaux Pizza. Whereas the Pizza Hut preferred pan crust contained a cup of oil, the Breadeaux crust was kind of tossed around with varying degrees of mastery by its high school employees, one of whom was my friend Jack. I remember going to visit Jack while he tossed around pizza dough and answered the red phone that hung by the door to the back. There was no seating in Breadeaux, so one could hang around relatively easily. It's kind of sad that in a small town hanging around your friends while they are getting paid and you are not is a popular pastime, but it did happen reciprocally when I worked the concession stand at the swimming pool, so I didn't mind too much.

The Breadeaux crust was based on the concept of French bread, so it was chewier and sort of sweet, which had a good balance with sausage. That pizza place went out of business years ago and I haven't had Breadeaux since high school, but I can still remember the taste pretty easily. It's the taste of high school Homecoming float building sessions with chicken wire, napkins and spray paint in someone's Morton building or barn; the taste of slumber parties and family get-togethers on Sunday nights.

Oh, and the Breadeaux employees had to wear French chef hats. That was also pretty rad.

When I was a kid, there was a bench in my parents' house that was just long enough for a small child to lie down with her head touching one armrest and her feet touching the other. I loved that bench. I still love it -- my parents gave it to me when I moved out. Sometimes I go upstairs and sit on it and realize how totally uncomfortable it is, but I still love its swoopy wooden details. I don't have the house or the budget for the amount of swoopy wooden details I would buy if I could.

I was moving some things around a few days ago and put a little rectangular pillow on the sturdy, uncomfortable bench in our living room, the one that went so well with the Mission 1902 style of This Old House but not so much with the seventies vibe lingering in Chateau Travolta. I don't think anyone in the family has ever sat on it except to put on or take off shoes, but it holds all of our living room blankets under its seat, so it lives on in the corner of the room.

The day I put the pillow there, my daughter came home from school and saw it and immediately went over to lie down. Her head touched one armrest and her feet touched the other. She looked down, pulled a book out of her backpack and didn't move for the next hour.

Pretty cool.

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Speaking of things kids like, you can win a giant cardboard playhouse now through Nov. 1 at Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews!

Beloved cleaned out under the bed this week and pulled out my seething mass of forgotten purses. I will go ahead and admit that some of them date back to college. And still have stuff in them from college. Like my gold University of Iowa card with my Social Security number printed on it, because we totally all used to use our Social Security numbers as our student IDs and driver's license numbers, back when the world was new. There was my Mike's Liquors video store card (I know, I know). He inexplicably found his University of Northern Iowa student ID in one of my purses, too. I can't explain that, don't remember him giving it to me -- did I steal it? It IS a hot picture. 

This morning I stared at the pile in the corner of the bedroom, not wanting it to be there any more. I am firmly anti-pile, especially in my zen space. I ended up opening all the pockets, pouring $35 or so in change into the little angel's piggy bank and throwing away more than half of them. Why I still have them is a mystery -- they're out of style and beat up and full of leaking ballpoint pens and the sticky foulness that is the bottom of a fifteen-year-old purse. It was freeing to dump them in the garbage. In doing so, I realized how much I've changed and not changed and how little I really remember of the girl who carried and in some cases wore those purses through Iowa City and on spring break and to Chicago and Kansas City and all the places in between. The only thing that seems real is the now.

Right now I have one large red handbag that I carry almost every day, regardless of fashion or weather or my outfit. It contains smaller bags with working pens and oral pain medicine for when the little angel's teeth hurt and my business cards and wallet and lip gloss. It's the me of now, thank God.

Five minutes ago, it was Friday night and I was cleaning my house at 10 p.m.

Then it was Saturday, and five of my friends and I threw a shower in the morning and a bachelorette party in the evening for our bride getting married in two weeks. I laughed and cried alternately and with equal force for more than 24 hours straight as the seven of us worked through the happiness of the upcoming celebration and the grief of concurrent personal tragedies.

Then it was 2 a.m. on Sunday, and I was drifting off to sleep in my friend Kathy's house on my air mattress.

Then it was noon on Sunday, and I was hauling downed tree branches out of the yard in preparation for our end-of-summer neighborhood barbecue. That my daughter and her friend unexpectedly invited more people to than I realized. Note to self: Don't hand a seven- and eight-year-old invitations and tell them to go deliver them unsupervised. It was, of course, totally, fine, but the shock, I tell you.

Then it was 9 p.m. on Sunday, and we were dragging back inside the tables and food and laughing about nine kids playing swords and shields while hiding behind the protection of every umbrella in my garage.

Then it was 11 p.m. on Sunday, and I was realizing how many memories we packed into two days, and their bulk shoved aside any other thoughts in my head.

Then it was 8:30 a.m. on Monday, and I sat down to write this. I'm literally shocked it's already today. My conscious mind is still stuck back on Friday night, which is the last time I wasn't swept along completely in the moment.

Life isn't always linear. Not really.

She stood on her tiptoes to put the Father's Day cards in the mailbox, her pigtails so long they hung halfway down her back, blowing occasionally in the hot summer wind already sweltering at eight in the morning. From the back, she could've been my seven-year-old sister back in 1984.

 

Most of my childhood memories are of summer -- on my grandparents' porch or under the weeping willow, visiting Gran in the hairdryer heat of Arizona or running around my own yard barefoot. Hot wind blowing through my pigtails.

Sometimes, when the wind is just right, the memories come back with such clarity, I can taste the rhubarb pie or feel the upholstery of my gran's ancient car. I can see the firefly jar.

What will she see when the hot winds blow on her at 37? I wonder.