Today’s guest writer for the Summertime Rewind series is April. April lived in Missouri the same time that we did, but we didn’t become friends until after we’d moved away. Another reason I’m thankful for the internet!

April is a scientist and the mom of one of the cutest little girls I’ve ever seen.

When I was asked to write a guest post about a childhood memory of summer, all I could think of was heat. I’ve just moved back to the Midwest after a five-year stint in the Mediterranean climate of the San Francisco Bay Area. All those years of mild weather have turned me into a bit of a wimp, and I’ve been struggling with having actual seasons and with the very early summer we’ve been experiencing this year. So it seems fitting, at least to me, that the memory I’m sharing is one in which heat is a vital ingredient to the story.

In the waning weeks of summer, I was a bored ten-year old, waiting for school to begin. The weather was sweltering, so I was mainly watching TV and pondering testing out the assertion grown-ups kept making about it being hot enough outside to fry an egg. One morning I happened to catch on of those kiddie science shows; it might have been Mr. Wizard. The project for the day was to make a solar cooker. I should probably mention that I pass for a scientist, in the modern world. My parents should have known, from the time my age hit the double digits, that this would be my fate, but they were probably too busy yelling at me for ruining all the shampoo by mixing it with my step-father’s shaving cream, hoping a cool and unexpected chemical reaction would occur. (It never did).

A solar cooker, at least the one made on the show that day, was really quite easy to construct, and I happened to have all the necessary equipment. With no objections from my mother, I set to work. I collected the supplies: a shoebox, aluminum foil, a wire clothes hanger and a hotdog.

It was simple enough to line the bottom of the shoebox with aluminum foil and poke a hole in each end. The only really challenging part was straightening out the wire hanger, but somehow I managed. The wire hanger served as a skewer to suspend the hotdog in the middle of the foil-lined box. Hidden behind the garage, I carried out my clandestine project. I’m not sure why I was trying to maintain such stealth, but I didn’t want anyone to know of my experiment. I placed the newly fashioned solar cooker in the sun and waited, turning the wire-hanger a few times to ensure even cooking. And cook it did, that hotdog browned up nicely; it plumped up like it had come straight out of a Ball Park Franks commercial.

Unceremoniously I devoured my experiment, no plates or buns; I ate it with my bare hands, the juice dripping down my chin. It was the best hotdog I have ever eaten. I don’t actually like hotdogs. I didn’t then, and I don’t now, but that day, eating that hotdog was rapture for me. I tried to repeat my initial success, but could never achieve transcendental quality of that first hotdog. I now realize it was not the hotdog that made the memory of the flavor so great, but it was the sense of accomplishment I gained from a project done entirely on my own.

Now I have a three year old, and I hope one day she has her own hotdog moment. I doubt it will in anyway resemble mine, but I hope I can give her the resources and freedom she needs to experiment.