When I was a little girl, my mum baked me a tiny cake every weekend – a plain vanilla or chocolate sponge. My mum is old school and still believes that the best butter is the kind you make yourself. She would boil the whole, raw milk (delivered fresh to our house everyday from the local dairy) and then harvest the thick layer of cream that formed over the surface of the milk as it cooled. By the end of the week, mum would have a tub full of rich, creamy goodness sitting in the fridge. She would then painstakingly churn the cream and go through the various steps involved to turn it into glossy unsalted, white butter. She would then use this butter to make me a cake. Needless to say, it was the best cake I’ve ever tasted and I never became tired of delving into this melt-in-your-mouth goodness everyday at afternoon tea-time.
Years have gone by and somehow the memory of this weekly tradition slipped away into the deep archives of my mind. A couple of weeks ago, an old friend of mine visited my mum and spent an evening with her. The two of them chatted and somehow the conversation came around this topic of cakes and my mum reminisced about her weekly cake making routine. Understandably, my friend, a mother herself, was very touched by the amount of effort my mum poured into expressing her love for me. My friend later made it a point to mention this to me and like a wave the warm memory from my childhood flooded my heart and mind.
My mamma worked a full-time job so I can now, as a mother myself, truly appreciate how much of herself she sacrificed to make sure that I was always at the centre of her world. As my mind danced through the memory of mamma’s delicious cakes and my earliest baking lessons as an excited 6 yr old, my mind revisited an important lesson that mamma once communicated to me using the example of cream.
I was 16 or 17 years old at the time and I was all set to travel interstate to serve in a military camp for 45 days. By this time, I had done many army camps but it would be my first time travelling interstate on my own as a young cadet. Amidst the excitement and the nervousness, mamma handed me a stack of letters neatly tied together with a red satin ribbon. “One letter for each day that you’re away”, she said. Even as I smothered her in hugs saying thank you, I couldn’t have fathomed the wealth of encouragement, love and wisdom so compactly gripped by a length of ribbon.
One particularly rough evening, I collapsed onto my cold and hard camp bed. As my mind raced over the many events of the day, my aching hands reached over for mum’s stack of letters. The letter began with the usual cheery and uplifting greeting before quickly transitioning into a story. My fatigue melted away as I read about a green frog who once wandered into a dairy. The inquisitive little frog was fascinated by the appearance of the dairy. He lost no time in exploring this very interesting and foreign looking place. Unfortunately, his excitement was short-lived as he accidentally fell into a pot of cream. The little frog did the only thing he knew how to do – he began to paddle. He paddled and he paddled but he had no way to scale the smooth walls of the pot. The little frog felt quite hopeless. Hours passed and his little legs began to tire. He felt quite ready to give up. But somehow, every time he thought about stopping, he would tell himself, “Maybe I’ll keep going for just one more minute.” All of a sudden the little frog felt something around him change. The creamy pool around him was starting to thicken and firm up. With each agonising stroke, the little frog started to find a footing upon a solid-like surface that wasn’t there before. The little frog had no idea that liquid cream turns into solid butter when churned persistently. He was pretty amazed himself as he hopped off the surface of the butter and out of the pot.
The story of the frog is a fairytale-like analogy for life and the essence of mamma’s story has stuck with me over the years. There is always something to be said for plain and boring ol persistence – whole heartedly and unceasingly pouring ourselves into everything we do. There are very few situations in life that can’t be shifted by sheer persistence. Sometimes winning the battle lies in the magic of simply going the extra minute.
These days, we buy our butter. We pace the aisles of the supermarket and distractedly throw supplies into the cart. We live in a busy world that lays no emphasis on the mundane process that yields the final outcome. However, every now and again, as we hurriedly butter our toast at breakfast and prepare to launch ourselves into the challenges of the day ahead, it helps to stop and remind ourselves that every block of butter was once a runny pot of cream.
– Melissa Domingo
9 July, 2017