Remains of the day

This morning I was nursing my butter addiction along side my coffee addiction. After Easter, the butter is the battered remains of a molded lamb. Two years ago the little old lady who made these for all of southern Fairfield county broke her leg and up and ended up in a nursing home just in time for Easter.

I cannot tell you the ruckus that ensued over how anyone was going to be getting any lambs. She would not tell anyone else how to make make the clove-eyed wonders nor surrender her molds. She just slammed shut the door of the whole buttery lamb thing and bid us all keep in mind how critical she was to us.

The next year, a local church in an enough-is-enough-with-your-broken-legged self-importance gesture, ordered a whole mess of lamb molds and doled them out liberally. So, everyone was pretty well-lambed last year, though people still called the Ukraine church and asked for the old girl and her lambs. She was home by then but still not willing to allow the lamb-tending into the hot hands of some bush league butter dilettante who maybe had never even laid shifty eyes on a real lamb and certainly would have no clue as to the spiritual meaning of the thing. Just not a thing for butter putters and the like, obviously.

This year, the lamb lady is holed up somewhere and, likely having heard everyone with a birthday was given a lamb mold last year, is hot, if not downright antagonized. I can only hope she has not begun to mold little voodoo figures out of margarine in hopes of evening up the score.

I digress, but I've been sore about this lamb bickering and subsequent fiasco for three years running. I have to tell you, I just do not want to hear about anymore. I mean, really. Is cloistering yourself with a hundred lamb molds the Christian thing to do? I'm talking my sacred lamb plastic and I'm going home. You are not going to have the old lamb bag to kick around anymore!

I know, I know, let it go. But look, it's a little crazy (hang on while I clean the windows in my glass house, will you?).

Alright. In any event, there I was, half a slaughtered butter lamb (made by my Mama, touche!) and some nut bread and I got to thinking about this pretty set of dishes my Mom used on Easter. I remember them fondly. My Grandparents saved grocery store tickets to get the full set when we were very tiny. This is the blue set, there was also a green. I will say this was about 1978 or so, it is one of my earliest memories.

Can you honestly believe a grocery store gave away something this pretty and delicate? It is, I promise you, beautiful. I understand their diligence in saving those Finest receipts now.

The mark is Myott, England, Forget Me Not, Fine Staffordshire Ware. While it may not have been all that "fine" in quality, it is very fine to the eye. The lambs looked heavenly on them.