Food, Animals

Figure 1.

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The way it worked is that we would stop at Alvina's house about once a week, either on the way home from Jefferson City or having come from school in Russellville. If you volunteered or were conscripted into service, you opened the car door and stepped onto the white pebbles of Alvina's driveway. Unless it was winter, you left the car door open. If Alvina was near, you said hello or waved. She was nice.

You entered the shed and went through the dim first room and then stepped down one step that was never quite where you expected it to be. There on the left was the deep cooler, and you reached down and pulled out a gallon of fresh milk, which was cold and heavy. The huge glass jar was wet because the cooler was filled with water, and you lifted the jar carefully and there was no easy way to hold it. No handles. If we were picking up two gallons, someone came with you. One of your parents. Or a sister. One person could only carry one jar. That was the equation.

You now stood, holding eight pounds of milk, in one of the dark places of the world. This, though, simplified your exit. All you had to do was aim for the light coming through the doorway leading outside. And once you got the milk back into the light of day you saw it—the milk itself—for the first time. White. You climbed back into the car you and put the milk on the floor and held it upright by squeezing it between your shins and keeping one hand on the lid, which was the size of a saucer. As the driver pulled carefully back onto the blacktop, accelerating slowly, you realized the milk was moving in the jar. You were reminded that it was a liquid.

From Alvina's you drove south to the gravel road and then rolled down the gravel road—down four hills, up four hills, but not in that order—and then turned into the long driveway. The driveway traced the perimeter of a grassy hill. At the corner in the driveway you looked at the gravelly shoulder where turtles could be found surprisingly frequently—say, once a year. Tortoises. This was also the corner where your sisters had once seen a rattlesnake and walked around it by cutting through the pasture. So the story went.

The car climbed the little hill—slowly—and then you saw the house, the barns. On your right was a valley of pastures and fields. There were lines of trees along the fencerows. One of the ponds was down there.

When the car got closer to the farmhouse, the terrier and the small black cat would issue forth from the front porch, and that—that moment—was one of the best parts of the day. Here was your universe, your sun and your moons. You carried the milk inside, and if anything it seemed colder now than when you'd first lifted it into your arms; you hefted it onto the counter, you unscrewed the tremendous lid, and you skimmed the cream from the top. With the cream, we would make butter or occasionally whipped cream or sometimes ice cream. As for the milk, we drank it and used it for baking and sometimes gave a splash of it to the cats. We mixed it with a dollop of yogurt and put it in a jar and put the jar in an insulated box and put the box down by the refrigerator's warm exhaust, and in the morning the milk would be yogurt. During the summer, we put the milk on our cereal. During the school year, we had hot breakfasts every morning and weren't allowed cold cereal, but we would drizzle a little milk on our oatmeal. Just a little. It helped cool the oatmeal. The oatmeal was hot. "Oatmeal, meet milk. Milk, meet oatmeal." That's the kind of thing we would say.

The milk was not...