Good Butter

Sep 22, 2023

Good Butter

There is an audio recording of me reading this piece further down the page for my paid subscribers, who make it possible for me to eat good butter once in awhile. A few extra photos down there, too. Xo

I only keep a handful of early-life memories around and only a scant few of those with any clarity, tucked safely into some dark fold of my mind where the sun never reaches, neither does time, they hold their color and sharp lines as new as a Polaroid just pulled. One resurfaced last night –two farmboy brothers next door, roughly ages four and eight and I was probably five. Just black denim jeans and the taught torsos they were born in, they stood in the dogleg, dirt driveway, feet grey as dead men from their mason daddy’s stone dust, rat tails coiled between summer-brown shoulder blades - one braided, one felted like a frayed rope. The older brother stood in a wide, warrior stance, eating a moon-sized Ailsa Craig onion like an apple, the younger, crouched comfortably on a rock wall, a barn cat worshiping hard at his knee, squinting up at him, a small god, for now, while he ate a stick of butter like a candy bar. Everything shining - the late summer sundown, the greased lips and fingers, the opalescent onion and its joy at being the main course, the sovereignty in the boys’ eyes for having what they want as they want it, the capaciousness of desire even as it is being fulfilled, I thought, “This is living”. It could’ve all been rose gold from the blooming crush I had on the onion eater or it could’ve been the row of peach trees, the pair of peacocks, the jersey milker named Daisy, but, I suspected then, and I suspect now, that it might be that this is just all I know how to care about —the freedom of small, private pleasures.

The other day, I cried the whole ride home over a couple hundred bucks lost, I thought I needed, I thought I had, I thought was me, I thought would turn the dark thing light, I thought might last the rest of my life, I thought was enough to bribe the gatekeepers of powers to grant me the one that I want — invisibility. I heard a radio show where they asked people if they’d rather be invisible or able to fly and then, of course, they speculated on the deeper meanings of the answers. Flying appears to be the more virtuous choice - the typical linking of extroversion to goodness, of doing to good, while choosing invisibility brought only side-eyes of skepticism - like, what could one possibly want to do, alone and unseen, except spy on people in showers. No one seemed to consider the people who want nothing more than to be left alone, maybe a little light shoplifting from the specialty grocer, samples, really, but aside from that - the desire for the absence of the flesh body might be purely to move through the world unbothered, and to be able to sit and watch wild animals without binoculars, obviously.

The crying in the car was an instance of stale imagination that I’m not proud of. I must’ve been hungry. The next day, I drove an hour to wait in line to spend every penny I didn’t have on a small brick of, what I was told was, the best butter in the world –Le Beurre Bordier. I don’t easily subscribe to “best”s, but I looked into the story of this butter, made by a third-generation cheesemaker, raised “bearing witness to a ‘friendliness to cheese’” who says things like “Without cows, nothing would be possible.” and “When my butter cries, it means it is singing. When my butter sings, it means it is crying.” and “Butter is the blotting paper of nature.” I trusted it couldn’t be bad. While I had my imagination back, I was also rich enough for a good baguette, a dozen oysters, and a bottle of wine, since I was in town. This wide swing from crying poverty to overindulging is a tidy example of my overcompensating nature, never quite able to stick the landing on that sensible middle ground - also something I’m not proud of, but sometimes entertaining to watch, in hindsight.

I’ve had bread before that was so good it didn’t need butter - when I was of pre-school age, my two older siblings and I would sneak into the kitchen while mom’s breads were cooling and saw them in half and reach in up to our shoulders to scoop out the doughy crumb from the long loaves with our little hands and stuff our mouths and set the hollowed crusts back together on the counter like nothing had happened. I think I’m only beginning now to realize the true offense of this act. On the other hand, I’m also just now realizing that we were halfway to an M.F.K. Fisher “railroad sandwich” - a Parisian train station staple of good ham and butter on a baguette, Fisher’s version pulls all of the crumb from the baguette before laying the butter and ham on thick (mustard and bitter greens optional), then wrapping in paper and sitting upon for the duration of her train ride, employing the body as a sandwich press. I’ve now adopted this as my deer-hunting sandwich, pressing it by placing at the bottom of my pack with all of my things stuffed on top, employing over-packing as a sandwich press. I eat it halfway through the day as a reward, usually for seeing nothing, and as fuel for another half day of likely seeing nothing again. This sandwich- a spackle of butter like a slap in the face to self-pity - is for when I’m all the way high on the indulgent swing of the pendulum - probably after a week of hunting in sleet with only unsalted peanuts and a lump of cheddar, plastered with pocket lint. As much as I love the woods, it seems I need a lot of snacks to stay. Anyways, those fistfuls of mom’s warm dough were so good they never once called out for butter, but, until now, I’d never had butter so good that it didn’t want bread.

The first night, I set the butter on the counter to let it soften while I grilled the oysters, chilled the wine, sliced the bread –it loomed in my peripheral vision. I pulled back the wrapping to peek and actually gasped at its yellowness - I left it unwrapped, like having an extra lamp lit in the room. I brought it all to the table and we began - taking small, ceremonial mouthfuls of each thing on its own, stitched together with sips of the saline wine - its grapevines growing beside oyster beds, and everything came together and stood apart gorgeously. The butter was transporting – a slick of sunshine over the mouth that forced the eyes closed, the wine was exactly as good with the oysters as the label told me it would be. I felt full and rich and satisfied that I had, again, snuck into and out of the larder of the well-heeled, unnoticed. There was, though, as much I hate to admit it, a quiet anticlimax - a false peak of a mountain, that I sometimes find myself on after eating food that I’ve purchased. It always tastes just as good as someone has told me it’s going to taste, but I feel no innate body-knowledge of how good it is - it doesn’t ignite any corporeal hunger. A dislocation, I think, might be part of the problem, as opposed to the acute self-locating effects of eating wild strawberries in the field, or the seared and basted loin of a deer that I, for a moment, knew, as a deer - foods that tell me where I am and make me badly want to stay.

This morning was cold and I woke to slow crickets and heavy dew and loons calling from the pond. I read from the collected letters of Flannery O’Connor and talked with the friend who gave me the book, about how “she writes like swinging a razor”. I went outside with coffee to stack firewood and Sal stood, just stood, in the sun like a warming horse in a pasture, when just last week she was shade seeking. I watched catbirds thrashing in the elder shrubs and mixed flocks of migrating warblers maraud through the trees by the woodshed for worms dangling from silken threads. I watched leaves fall. I got splinters and a sore wrist. I thought about my mother and stepfather coming over for dinner later and the fingerlings I’d roast them and if I should butter them with sweetfern or porcini. I dared to wonder if I might have time to go fishing this weekend. A morning made entirely of small, private pleasures. The sun cleared the treeline and I was hot and spent and farmboy hungry. I went inside and pulled off my sweater and boots and drank cider straight from the jug, a little fizzy, how I like it. I looked in the fridge for some easy grab and saw the butter. I took it out of its paper. The cat came down the ladder from the loft and sat at my feet. Though it was mid-morning and full daylight I felt, in the house, I wasn’t seeing the butter clearly, I kept squinting, so I went back outside. It seemed to swallow the sun immediately, turning full daisy-eye gold. I could see it was crying and a genuine body-hunger struck. With no one to see me but Sal, my front teeth sunk through the end of the bar and I held it in my mouth. It softened quickly and my eyes went wide at the flood and a little spilled from the corner of my mouth as I stifled a laugh. Pairing somewhere between the nose and the mouth with goldenrod, aster and fennel flowers in the air I now recognized the French butter —grass, cow, cow loved by human, human forehead against cow belly each morning, a quiet song, human hands, salt. I could taste it myself now - having it as I wanted it - for what it was. It was the best butter in the world.