Crosswalks to Nowhere

The weather here has been alternately hot and muggy and cool and rainy. The tomatoes are digging it, as are the beans. We have a few tomatoes and peppers on the plants, and the cukes are starting to climb.

This photo was taken just before I went in and trimmed the tomato plants back.

In the right rear corner of the garden, you can see the emerging Mammoth sunflowers. By next update, they should be significantly taller.

Salsa and tomato sauce soon!

We just got back from our (sorta) annual trip to Scottsdale, and for the first time Lisa was part of all the traditions. And boy, was she ever told about the traditions. :-)

The weather was beautiful, even though it was well over 100° every day.

Every time I drive down Higgins/Touhy Avenue in unincorporated Elk Grove Village (or it might be Des Plaines, when I think of it), my eyes are always drawn to an old, abandoned gas station just west of some railroad tracks.

One day back in the early 1980s I took my parents to the airport, and on the way home I stopped here to fill up the car. I paid $1.29 a gallon that day.

A week later I passed by the station and it was closed. The signs, lights, pumps, station house, and billboards were all in place, but the station never reopened. The Marlboro cartons were still stacked just inside the station's windows. The sign with the gas prices still read $1.29 for Regular.

Over the next twenty-some years I drove by the place every so often and saw how it was both frozen in time and deteriorating simultaneously. The "1 29" eventually fell off the sign, the billboards, station, and a couple light posts collapsed, and the concrete became overgrown as the prairie reclaimed its space.

A few years ago, someone took over the property and stacked huge concrete blocks all over the property and surrounding area. You can see they left the sign and one of the lights intact. (The billboard with the law firm advertisement is a newer addition.) I've wondered if the station and everything else is still there behind the concrete and bushes.

I'm not sure why I'm drawn to this place. Maybe it has to do with the way it's become a physical representation of the passage of time and the fact that things keep moving forward even after "business as usual" is done. That I was at the gas station right before it closed somehow connects me to it.

Now, if only that $1.29 gas was still around...

In the few weeks since I last posted a garden update, we've had a lot of rain and many humid, sunny days. You can see the tomatoes (left), beans (middle), cucumbers (right) and sunflowers (back row) all love this weather. Also digging the weather but much less visible are the onions and pepper plants, next to the tomatoes.

The tomato plants are almost 5 feet tall and the sunflowers are approaching 6 feet. We have a lot of fruit on the tomato plants (still all green), and I picked our first cayenne peppers and green beans last night.

Salsa soon. In the meantime, I'm gonna have to do some trimming in there.. :-)

Picture this: it's a summer night in the 1970s, around midnight. Two kids start scrounging through the kitchen of an Evanston home looking for a snack. One finds a box of Sunshine Lemon Coolers cookies, and the kids sit down at the kitchen table and plow through the box in about 30 minutes. Buzzed on sugar, the two head back to their sleeping bags and lay awake the rest of the night reading comic books.

That was my introduction to one of the most delicious cookies I've ever tasted. The kids in the story were my cousin and me, and my aunt had bought the Lemon Coolers earlier that day. She was pretty upset that they were gone by breakfast, but it was worth it.

Lemon Coolers were round, lemon-flavored, crispy-almost-shortbread cookies with lemon chips dusted with lemon-flavored powdered sugar coating. They were unique in that nobody else made cookies like these-- the only way to get them was in their green and yellow box, and many grocery stores only sold them during the summer.

Over the years I would pick up a box, at least one per summer, when I saw them on the shelves. But like so many other things of our youth, Lemon Coolers fell victim to The Bottom Line. Keebler/Kellogg's bought Sunshine in the 1990s, and in their infinite wisdom they discontinued the product.

Now, I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

I've been looking for something similar to Sunshine Lemon Coolers cookies since then. Supposedly, the Girl Scouts sold a "Lemon Coolers" cookie years back but I have never seen them in real life. There was also allegedly a President's Choice-branded lemon cookie but I've never seen that, either. Then I found several recipes on the internet for Lemon Cooler-like cookies, and the recipes I tried-- even with a few tweaks-- were awful.

Last night, I went to the Jewel and found Archway Iced Lemonade Cookies. I was intrigued, especially by the word "crispy." I figured I had little to lose, so I bought a bag.

I was very pleasantly surprised: this is the closest thing to Lemon Coolers I've tasted in a long time. The cookies have the right texture, and while they don't have lemon chips in the cookie itself they have just the right flavor. The iced coating isn't as tart as the powdered sugar on the originals, but it's a lot less messy so I'll call that an improvement.

Thank you, Archway.

Now all I need is a tall iced tea and some time in the hammock. And maybe a comic book or two.