Ice Cream Sandwiches

It's summertime and this year I've rediscovered an old childhood favorite, the ice cream sandwich. I hadn't eaten one in years and when Alex ran out of a store one day and handed them out to those of us waiting in the car, I was transfixed. We got them in for the ranch staff to snack on and I've eaten an embarrassing number of them so far this season. They just make me feel good. I'm not talking about a new fangled home made version. I'm talking about the classic. Chocolate wafer cookie outside, shaped into a rectangle and softened into a cake-y delight by it's close contact with the ice cream. The filling, a simple vanilla flavored frozen confection, whipped light and melting rapidly upon the tongue. There's something about the sensation of sinking your teeth through soft, slightly sticky layers of chocolate and cold creamy vanilla that brings back the smell of hot pavement and cool ocean breezes, memories of long bike rides under a blazing sky and evenings spent capturing fireflies and then letting them go when they tickled the palms of my hands. We rarely went in for glass jars of trapped insects in my neighborhood. Half the magic was in the capture and the other half was watching them float free afterwards. There's a certain freedom in letting things go. There's also a special joy in rediscovery, stumbling across old friends and finding that years may have passed but somehow relationships remain the same.