Not Boughten

I

I just finished churning the 75th pound of this season’s butter, which means I’ve got about 125-pounds to go if we’re to escape the indignity of what the boys have termed “boughten butter.” Most years, we don’t quite make it; this family has a serious butter habit, to the tune of at least four-pounds weekly. Last summer, owing to a confluence of factors, I only barely hit the 150-pound mark, and by March, we could be found skulking through the dairy aisle in search of spreadable fat.

It’s safe to say I have something of a butter obsession; for whatever reason, it has come to serve as my emblem of this little farm’s prosperity. Of all the foodstuffs we produce, it is perhaps the only one which cannot be sourced on the open market. Oh, sure, we can procure boughten butter, but there’s no such thing as boughten butter: Cultured, unpasteurized, the garishly yellow hue of cows fattened on the sweet flush of late-May grass. Once, many years back, someone approached us about selling butter, and I was honestly a bit dumbstruck: Sell our butter? I could not imagine a price that would account for all it means to us, so I gave her a pound and sent her on her way.

We are in the season of abundance, that’s for damn sure. The butter piling up, the blueberry bushes drooping and folding under the weight of their ripening fruit. Every day, Penny picks gallons, and when we are out in public (not that often this time of year, given all the gifts of the land that require tending), our blue-stained lips draw stares. The piggies are fattening into their full succulence, and in a week, we’ll put a year’s worth of beef in the freezer. The garlic is drying. The barn is full of hay. The potatoes look fantastic; owing to our remineralization protocol, potato beetles are nearly a non-issue. Green beans. The first tomatoes last night on burgers, and lemme tell you: There ain’t nothing so fine as a bloody rare burger under the first tomato you’ve tasted in nearly 11 months. The batch of dry cure sausage I hung a few weeks ago is ready, so we slice it paper thin and let it melt into our tongues. Rye is milking his goat every morning, and we eat chèvre by the spoonful. It’s going to be a hell of an apple year, too, and the wild blackberries? Crazy. Just crazy. This morning, I strolled down to our favorite yellow foot chanterelle stash and what do you know? The first of the lil’ buggers are just emerging from the forest duff.

The land gives so much and asks for so little in return. The older I get, the more I realize how true this is. And the more I wish to be the same.