Butter Me Up

As I was making my breakfast the other morning, I was reminded of several of my relatives and how they used to apply butter to their bread or toast. My first recollection is of my home and how the stick of oleo rested on a saucer that my mom, Sybil would extract from the refrigerator and place in the middle of the table. Rock hard, we would have to scrape the butter knife along its top, shaving off a thin curl of the nearly unyielding margarine to make it somewhat spreadable. Yet it always remained solid enough to tear holes in your bread. If we had toast, we could let the heat of toast soften the curl before spreading.

The second person I remembered was my mother-in-law, Retha Morrison. When she visited and I made breakfast, she wanted her have toast lightly buttered. She always asked me to apply the butter to it, only wanting a very light skim of the butter to the surface. If we ate at a restaurant, she didn’t trust the staff and asked for dry toast and butter to spread her own.

Just the opposite was my grandfather, Raymond Miner. A farmer by day and a coal miner at night, he and my grandmother Rebecca churned their own butter. Granddad would milk the cows and save the cream for Grandma to pour it into her old wooden churn. The churn had paddles on the inside and a crank handle on the outside. The splashing of the cream was eventually replaced with mounds of pale yellow butter. Packed into a rectangular wooden mold, Gram would wrap the butter in waxed paper to sell or for her family to use. Granddad loved butter and most often spread a layer of it nearly an eighth of inch thick across the entire slice of Gram’s homemade bread before he started to enjoy whatever food Gram made.

Another spreadable memory of mine is of my uncle Theodore “Ted” Miner. He was meticulous almost to the point of being a fanatic when applying anything spreadable to his bread. It didn’t matter whether it was butter or Miracle Whip or whether it was jelly or anything spreadable, it had to cover the entire top of the bread from crust edge to crust edge. I’ve made myself hungry. I think I’ll go and make breakfast.