B, L and HGT for supper

Yes, summer is here.

We welcomed it with sweet corn from the farm stand, and tonight we'll be saying hello to BLTs made with our own home-grown Ts.  Tomorrow or the next day the pickled horseshoe baloney I'm about to make will be ready to eat.

My mother would put together a meal of sweet corn, pickled horseshoe baloney, and sliced tomatoes several times a summer, especially on days when she deemed it too hot to cook.  Those suppers were generally consumed on the picnic table in the back yard in the shade of the big, beautiful sugar maple tree.

My father built that picnic table and its two benches out of two-by-fours and two-by-sixes and what seemed like several hundred bolts.  Very sturdy it was, but there was the problem of his having painted it white.  After the first attempted use of it on a sunny summer afternoon, it got repainted gray.  Good thinking, Dad.