A Sip of Sunny D

The other day, Clara brought home a jug of Sunny Delight she'd found on sale somewhere, something we hadn't had around the house for a few years now. Like Proust's madeleine, a sip flashed me back to a summer afternoon with the girls not long after I left the IRS to begin my too-short, stay-at-home-Dad career. We're in the kitchen, drinking Sunny D, bathing suits still damp from a trip to the community pool, , the smell of chlorine still in our noses, the Sunndy D cold and sweet and as bright tasting as the blazing Oklahoma sun outside. Tired. Happy.

(Maybe a more apt, up-to-date, recognizable simile would be Anton Ego in Ratatouille. Remember the scene as he tastes the penultimate dish as near the end of the movie and he has a sudden, rushing flashback of his lost youth? The sip was like that. Heartrending.)