bought a half gallon of buttermilk recently.
No one here drinks it but me so a half of a gallon seems a lot but I made short work of it.
I like it cold and will sometimes put a glass in the freezer and enjoy it just before it freezes.
Growing up, we often had it at dinner time with green onions, brown beans and corn bread and cucumbers and onions in vinegar. In winter mom would add sausage to that.
Looking back now I realize other people ate steak or chicken and coal miners and farmers ate what we did, poor folks food it is.
My dad grew up on that as did my mom. Everyone in West Virginia did I think.
We weren't poor when I was young, indeed far from it but we ate cornbread and beans none the less. All the cukes and tomatoes we ate , we grew. We could have bought those just as easily but folks didn't do that way back then.
About 2 AM last night I got up and poured a cold glass of the thick and slightly sour stuff and set a long while in the dark kitchen partially lit by the street light on the corner. As I nursed that glass of butter milk I though about the recent passing of my mom and when I was a kid, and when I was a soldier and a dozen other things. I thought about my brother, a paramedic and a fire fighter of some 30 years + service. I think of him at night now a good deal since 9/11. I worry about him on night shifts.
I thought of my grandmothers little house that was heated by a big coal stove and the little barn across the road from it. She always had a cow with a calf.
She made great butter milk.
Thomas Wolfe said you cant go home again and I guess you cant but there will always be butter milk and memories and dark kitchens.
