Yellow, pure, and flawless

butter

There are few perfect things in this world, and one of them is your common everyday pound of butter, cool in its box, printed in blues and greens with pleasant images – a farm, a farmer, a cow at a fence – and divided into quarters wrapped in immaculate paper as neatly tucked and folded as a soldier’s bunk, each section as easy to slide in and out as if riding on soundless rollers, like drawers in a filing cabinet, two two-drawer cabinets placed side by side, the files packed in manila, clean and fresh, with evenly spaced dividers arranged by a tablespoon. To press it to your cheek and then, with a fingernail, to carefully lift the triangular folds at each end, one end at a time, and then, without tearing the paper, to open the final flap and find there butter, yellow, pure, and flawless, too good to be true.


Photo: Rose Water & Orange Blossoms

44 thoughts on “Yellow, pure, and flawless

    1. Had to look up “paean.” Never heard of it. OK spill it. These words just roll down from your mind instantly to your fingers onto the keyboard and voila? Just incredible. Awe struck.

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  1. Butter is the real deal. I sat in a movie theater last night and ate popcorn with “what passes for butter”. It got stuck in my throat..WTH is that stuff, anyway ??

    Grandparents were immigrant dairy farmers. We never had margarine/ fake butter in the house. It would have been an insult. Still is.

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      1. Go back even further…to Oleo. It was only created to be more “spreadable” than butter..You could leave it out all day and it wouldn’t spoil. Not far from petroleum, I’d say. Tasted like crap, but it did spread easily..I had it at friend’s homes.

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      2. I’m embarrassed now that I tried to convince my parents to eat that *#@% instead of butter back in those days. I guess it’s a choice of heart disease or cancer. Choose your demise with butter or margarine. I’ll take butter any day.

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  2. Back in the 70s and 80s my mother replaced butter for margarine and milk with some sort of boxed s**t. It was “new and improved” and supposedly better for you. I tried to bring the margarine into my home as a new bride. Didn’t happen and I’m now thankful so small concessions. Glad I didn’t listen to the egg theory either.

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  3. Takes me back to my Grandmother’s kitchen where the scents of cinnamon, vanilla and everything good was always simmering or baking with – what else – butter! My big shouldered Swedish Grandpa used to slab it on homemade bread with equal portions of sweet chokecherry jelly — he’d grin as he ate it. Ahh … butter!

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