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Community Corner

MOMents - The Trouble With Sandwiches

A bi-weekly column by Amy Powell.

I’d like to say a word or two about sandwiches and why our offspring have such a hard time managing them.

It seems that over the years, misplaced sandwiches have factored into any number of fiascoes. To me, the choices seem obvious: eat it, let someone else eat it, put back in the refrigerator for tomorrow or throw it away. Too many times, this formula fails.

It probably starts with good intentions. I’ll eat it later and so forth, but usually ends with a very bad smell. It could be in the bedroom, the mudroom, or some room other than the kitchen where food belongs.

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We the parents might go for the obvious sources of bad smells: sweaty clothes, dirty socks, sneakers, perhaps a damp towel lurks under a bed? Maybe it’s time to change the sheets or empty the trash.

Try this and open a few windows.  Wait for things to air out. 

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The smell gets worse. Did an animal die? Look for a dead field mouse. Wonder if it’s a squirrel behind the walls?

The first time this ever happened was many years ago and it was not a sandwich, but an orange rotting in a backpack. You would think that after this experience, I would always check the backpack first, but that one was so awful that I thought lessons had been learned.

Wrong. Ultimately, we found the sandwich in the backpack, possibly for more than a month.  Unfortunately, we were not the first to find it. I’m not sure if I am unlucky or lucky because the vermin that found it first were of the insect variety.

I say this because another parent I know went on months of searching for a very bad smell and was ultimately led to it by way of the exterminator who came to deal with vermin that have fur and tails. 

This story all started with a sandwich press and a dad who thought he was making delicious and special sandwiches for his children. One child apparently did not agree, though I think mine enjoyed them from time to time and occasionally asked for extra fluff or things that might increase their trading position.

Rather than disappoint said parent, the friend traded or chucked the daily gourmet sandwich into his file cabinet, sending the parents on a fruitless search through dirty socks and trying solutions like better deodorant and so forth.

Parents just don’t think to look in the file cabinet for the source of a bed smell, but apparently vermin do and that caused some serious problems, but not enough for the occasional future sandwich to not end up in the wrong place.

I’m not sure of the moral to this story. Peanut butter sandwiches fair better over time than cold cuts. Tuna is the worst. Foil will out a sandwich quicker than a baggie, but I’m not sure if that is good or bad.

I considered myself fortunate recently to return from a trip to a bad smell. I’m getting better at this and found the turkey sandwich, still in the bag, right on my dining room table. I made the sandwich so I know it was less than a week old.

I guess the silver lining here is that I found it before any other creatures. 

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