Butter

Today I got a lesson (of sorts) in the art of churning butter. I work with a woman who loves to tell stories and she caught me in her well-woven-web today while I innocently tried to heat up my lunch. I'm always wary to go to the main office where the microwave is because I know she'll trap me and I won't get away for at least a half hour. So, she just started talking about butter and how her grandmother would churn it from the milk she got from her own cows.

She explained that one needs to be careful and watch what cows eat because the milk will end up tasting like whatever they ingest. "One time," she said, "The good dairy cow got into a field of onions and the milk tasted LIKE ONIONS." She giggled and said it made a great onion-flavored cheese. Another time a cow got into some turnips and though the milk didn't really taste of turnip, it caused severe bloating in the children (herself included). She chuckled gleefully as she recalled being under a tree with her cousins tooting away and giggling at the chorus, "Ah, so many farts that night!"

On, and on she reminisced about her childhood and her family back in that old southern farm 40+ years ago. She talked about how the churn had to always be clean and sanitary and how an aunt used that to her advantage so as to never have to churn again (she didn't clean her churn and ruined a large batch once). It made me yearn for a simpler time without the hustle and bustle of modern life. It made me cherish what I do have and remember that I hardly work for the food I eat and don't even know how to churn butter, and if I had a churner I probably wouldn't know what to do with it (if I even dared to try). It also made me realize how silly and trivial a lot of my worries are about lack of time and the inability to do the things I want when I can pop an entire meal in the microwave and eat a few minutes later (how long those few minutes seem at times) and actually still have time to do so much, but I'm still never satisfied.

Modernity, technology, and our love affair with efficiency and the future have really made us impatient and ungrateful beings. Can I honestly look back and reminisce about a time when a stick of butter was so important during a period in my life? Not at all! I take butter for granted and even eliminate it from my diet because it contains too much fat and sodium. But yet, my co-worker has dozens of fond memories associated with that very thing that can make my butt huge . . . BUTTER! This has taught me that we should just take a minute to really remember who we were and who we still are deep inside. Look around you, take a deep breath and smell the odors of life, and taste the memories. Maybe next time you butter a piece of burnt toast you too will learn how to churn something of your own.