Thinking about men in supermarkets, as I did the other day, and how they come home with work gloves and chili flavoured peanuts when they’ve been sent out for flour and bananas, I remembered a really funny story mama told me about spending some time with her stepkids in Wales one summer. They had found a great little house, Yew Tree Cottage that was near a river (full of salmon, heh, heh…wish I’d been there), and right next door was a raspberry farm stretching as far as the eye could see.
You could go over to the farm and take a little basket of berries and just leave your money on the table in another little basket that said, “Leave money here” and that’s how everyone in the neighbourhood got their raspberries. Well, raspberries require cream, sometimes, and mama said that they had a milkman who would come to the back door and leave whatever was on a little list that mama left out for him, except he didn’t.
Ever.
She would write a list of cottage cheese, yogurt and cream, and he would leave Stilton, a gallon of milk, and butter. This went on for days and days and finally she started drawing pictures of what they wanted–a cow with a bucket under it, or a churn, or a goat for goat cheese, a chicken with eggs nearby, that sort of thing. It got a little better but he still left odd things that mama hadn’t asked for.
Well, it turned out that our sweet milkman was a little…well…off. And that everyone in the area knew him and knew that he was in his own world and cared for him and just let him deliver the dairy products because it was an easy job and he had something to do. It was so sweet and mama found that if she just let him leave things he wanted to leave, she would get some wonderful new tastes she might not have gotten had she just stuck to butter and milk. And he never left too much. Just the right amount for four. Not so ‘off’ as people thought, perhaps.
And, best of all, papa found that All-bran really was kicked up a notch with clotted cream! Now who would have thought…? (Maybe me…)
And the eggs were really the best mama had ever eaten. She just had to hope that the milkman was feeling eggy that day!
This is in here only because I think it’s a pretty laid back pic…get it? Laid? Eggs? Haha
