The auction for Mom’s household furnishings took place on a low cloudy day with a slight rainy mist, the weather matching our mood. The decision to disperse her belongings via an auction rather than other methods had been made by the majority of our nine siblings. The loaded flatbeds, trailers, and hayracks lined a field beside the county road. Some of the domestic items and furniture held a legacy; others were just tools. The chilly mist swirled around us as the sale moved from one set of memories to another.
There was only one item I wanted: the butter churn. When the auctioneer started the bidding on it, I raised my number. Others in the crowd bid as well. But as the price increased, only two of us were still tendering bids. I turned to figure out who was bidding against me. It was a man I didn’t recognize but later learned was a farm neighbor. I said to him, “I’m going to pay for it at any price. I’m Marilyn Lund Leister. I churned butter on that churn and I want it kept in the family.”
He immediately stopped bidding. The auctioneer pounded his gavel. “Sold. $250 to the young lady with the blond hair, number 89.” I walked to the trailer, picked up the butter churn, and took it to the auctioneer’s assistant. As I wrote the check, I told her, “I got the one thing I wanted at the auction, this butter churn.” I opened the lid. There inside was the one-pound wooden butter mold. I hadn’t known the mold was inside when I was bidding. I was happy to get them both.
Making butter during my childhood had been a creative process as well as a productive one. Mom filled the wooden churn with cream that had been skimmed off many pitchers of milk. My siblings and I took turns wielding the crank. Before the cream turned into butter, halfway through the cranking process, the liquid cream became rich whipped cream. If Mom had baked bread that day, we stopped churning, scooped whipped cream on a slice of bread, and sprinkled sugar over the top. Even if we topped a slice of store-bought white bread with the whipped cream and sugar, the result was as delicious as any cake or cookie.
As we continued cranking the handle and just before the butter got too hard, Mom carefully squeezed a few drops of red margarine dye into the churn. This changed the color from whitish cream to the golden yellow color associated with store-bought butter. Being the youngest, when the butter started to harden, the crank would be too difficult for me to turn and I’d need help from one of my older siblings.
I pondered those memories as I got ready to leave the auction, placing the butter churn on the seat of the teal blue Mazda Protégé. I drove alone, at a time when I could still drive without falling asleep at the wheel. I was immersed in prayer for the farm that was no longer ours, realizing I no longer had a place to return to that I’d once called “home.” Lost in these thoughts, I didn’t realize I was speeding. When I saw circling yellow lights behind me and heard sirens, I realized that it was me that the county sheriff was trying to stop. The speedometer said 75mph. Bummer. I was in a 55-mph zone. As the sheriff pulled me over and parked in front of me, all my pent-up emotions rushed to the surface and I started to cry. “I’m driving home from my mother’s farm auction. I bought this churn.” I pointed to the butter churn, hiccups and sobs still oozing out of me. He gave me a warning ticket and a stern lecture not to speed or it would no longer be a warning. I continued to cry as I drove the speed limit the entire long trip from northern Minnesota to my Minneapolis home.
Would I ever use the churn to make butter? No. Would I buy milk from a farmer who sold unpasteurized milk? No. Do companies even make red margarine dye anymore to turn homemade butter yellow? I don’t know. I bought the churn for the sentimental reason of wanting something from the auction that reminded me of growing up on the farm. I wanted a family heirloom.
Written to answer a question that Suleika Jaoud quoted in The Book of Alchemy: “What would you write if you weren’t afraid – and what might happen if you wrote it anyway?” Jaoud borrowed the question from Dani Shapiro and further fleshed it out in her Nov. 30th Substack post, “A Beautiful Mess (& a Note of Gratitude).”
Marilyn Lund Leister. Edited and revised by Mary E. Berg.