Tuesday 2 October 2012

memoir chapter II-continued.

There is only one thing that I recall seeing in both our old house in Redmondville and our new house in Moncton.In those days my mother used to make,rather than buy butter.Now I don't ever recall her actually making the butter,so I can't say for certain how that was done.As far as I know she never had one of those old fashioned butter churns.I've seen them,I know what they look like,but I can't remember anyone in our house actually using one.So I think she must have somehow made butter in a big bowl,using cream and some salt.But in the refrigerator,there were these small packets of yellow,a sort of amber color,actually,coloring for butter.They came in a sort of a bubble pack with perhaps four to a pack.Butter,you see,in it's natural state is white.But those little packs of coloring I recall from both our refrigerator in the old house,and in our new place.My mother kept them in the place where you normally keep cheese,and I was small enough that I had to stretch to look up to see where it was.Shortly after we moved,my mother must have stopped making butter as I can only recall her having those little yellow packets for a very short time.I suppose it was simpler to go down the street to the store,given that butter could be bought cheaply,and that we no longer had a cow.We were a small enough family that there would likely been a surplus of cow's milk and my mother would likely have needed to find a way to use that surplus.

All that changed when we moved to the city.There you bought milk from a milkman, and you only bought what you needed for the day,because the milkman came everyday.Our milkman worked for a company called Sunrise Dairy and he delivered milk in an old green truck.He was a grumpy looking old man who never said much and looked more like a mechanic dressed in pinstriped grey overalls and a grey pork pie hat.His truck looked old and someone once told me that he had once delivered in our area with a horse and wagon.

Milk was brought to our house in glass bottles in those days.How it worked was that you bought metal tokens in advance for the milk.You then placed the tokens into the tops of the empty bottles and placed the bottles between the screen door and the big wooden door.Sometime in the very early morning, the milkman would arrive and take the tokens and the empty bottles,leaving full bottles behind in their place. Usually we were not up by that time,but the milkman would come back in the day sometimes to leave more milk tokens.When he did that,my mother would usually buy a bottle of chocolate milk.In the winter time,on the coldest of days,my mother would get up very early to retrieve the milk,as it would freeze and could break the glass bottles if you left them out too long.

It amazes me when I think back,but the way we bought milk changed several times over the course of my life,and each change seemed to mark a change in eras in my life.More about that later.But the coming of milk from the milkman,rather than from a cow marked the end of our rural lifestyle.When I was young,if you asked many of the kids in the city where milk came from,they would have told you"the milkman"or maybe"the milk truck." But I knew differently.

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