Memories

 

Ah, memories. Funny how they pop up and go away. I remember what a blast from the past it was. When it was just Kristin and me. And our little cottage in the woods of Canterbury. In the magical land of eastern Connecticut, US of A. Such a fairytale world it was. Dogs playing in the woods and brambles outside of our little home. Cats mewling at the windows. Bean stalks, squash, and zucchini vines growing up over the roof tops and edges of our home. Pumpkins hanging from the peaks and blossoming from the gutters. Squirrels chewing on the windowsills. Baba Yaga in her iron caldron flying overhead, such a joker.

Mice in the corridors. Cockroaches in the drainpipes. Kittens napping in the corners. Canaries in their cages. And a long, drowsy, sleeping me in the living room, waiting for her to come home after school, having spent my long-lived day grinding bits and bytes into procedures and programs in the potato mill that was the University of Connecticut Computer Center. God, I’m glad I left that place.

She came home from Girl Scouts one day with a new idea. A recipe for butter. That’s what the Den Mother taught them. “Look, Dad,” she exclaimed as I picked her up from the girl scout house. “You can make butter out of-Cream!” she said with enthusiasm.

You see, back then it was possible to make everyday necessities for yourself. Like butter, for instance. And the Girl Scouts taught girls such lessons. What a novel concept. Girls being taught to do something useful. I heartily approved. And participated.

So, anyway. It needed a mayonnaise jar, or so said Kristin’s Den Mom. “OK,” I said and found one in the cabinet, behind the canned sardines I always intended to use for some reason or other and alongside the peanut butter, extra chunky. I don’t remember why I bought that. But there it was.

This we took no time at all to empty, though we required a spatula to get all the bits at the bottom of the jar in the end. Mayonnaise is sticky. And hard to digest. But we managed it eventually. With a few crackers. And then we washed out the jar in the sink at the end of the spring in the back of our yard by the well, next to the wash house. The one by the banya? And next to the still. You can’t miss it. It smells like alcohol.

And then we put a pint of heavy cream into it. We quickly drank the leftover because heavy cream only comes in quarts at our friendly, family, neighborhood dairy farm, don’t you see, and the jar needs room to rumble with the cream and air and butter churning and such. It needed to be at room temperature, so we amused ourselves in the tepid temperature time tippling some turgid tonic or other which we had that was topical. Whatever. Canterbury does not lack for its tonicopia.

Then we shook the jar until the contents turned into butter and a slightly white looking, flimsy wash called buttermilk. The butter being the clumpy glob in the middle. We were delighted. We had it on English muffins. It was delightful.

Kristin was no more than 10 or 12 years old at the time. We were on our own back then. Actually, we were flat on our backs back then. She and I. I was divorced. Broke. Working, thankfully. Hanging by a thread, barely. Working two jobs, horrifyingly. Raising a little girl, gladly. Trying to make it work, make of that what you will.

We had just turned a pint of cream into a pound of butter. All on our own. In our kitchen. It was retched. But it was wonderful.