Kitchen | 10:08 | Stupid Butter
My wife always gouges the butter out of the middle of the block and makes a hole. When the next person comes to use it, they have to navigate around the hole and scrape from the sides. The hole sometimes encourages others to dig deeper. That’s a disaster.
I’ve never understood why she makes the hole. I’ve been asking her for twenty-six years not to. Each time she does it, I try my best to restore the block to something close to a rectangle. After a couple of days, I can get it looking like butter again. Then she makes one slice of toast, and the hole is back.
Last week, I went to butter my toast, and I noticed she had scraped the butter from the top. It was flat. No hole. It looked like butter should look. Rectangular. Communal. Flat. Worn down but still usable.
Why now? Why after so many years had she decided to scrape rather than dig? It wasn’t right, and it bothered me. So when it was my turn to take some butter, I dug a big hole in it!
Turns out I liked how she brought her chaos to our butter dish. I wanted to bring that part of her back. The only way I knew how was to deform the butter and rebel against my own standard.
In my own way, I was telling her that I saw what she was doing and I appreciated it. I was too stubborn to tell her that, though, and she missed the intention. She called me an idiot, and I was.
L. C. Fox-Smith - 31/08/26