Rolling down the highway -BTO

This is what western South Dakota looks like from the road. What's with all the song titles lately? They pop into my head easily.

Back to the photo. Look at that sky! I love the sky and I miss that in Iowa, which doesn't have the open skies.

In a dramatic shift because I can think of no segue, Little Debbie snacks turn 50 this year and that fact made me think of snacks and lunch boxes.

The smell of bananas always reminds me of my metal lunch boxes. The first time I had a banana or anything banana-flavored in a new lunch box, that box would (it seemed to me) reek of banana for the rest of the year. I can't look at a box of Little Debbie banana snack cakes in the store without recalling the smell and wrinkling my nose.

My most memorable lunch box had six renditions of cities on it. I can only recall now that Chicago was in the top row center position. I think Minneapolis and St. Louis were also involved. I loved that box and remember looking at the pictures while I ate lunch at the tables closest to the stage at Shenandoah Elementary in Huber Heights. Just as I did when I watched jets fly over the backyard, I just knew I would never get to the far-off and sometimes foreign places I saw and heard of because it was so expensive to travel.

I remember standing in neighbor Belinda's back yard watching a plane fly high overhead and thinking I would never get to Paris, France, which was where her mom was from. Her dad was from Butcher Hollow, Kentucky.

It's funny to me now. I think of it as my Wanderlust period. My parents were from Dayton, my grandparents from Dayton and I sort of figured I would be there forever. That turned into my cousins' stories, but not mine. Little did I know then that Fate was very, very keen to get me out of town.