We are in the part of the season where there is little time to do anything but move vegetables from one place to the next -- from truck to cooler, from basket to basket, from crate to table. Collecting and moving, constantly. Sometimes I wish that I could see all the week's vegetables in one giant pile, all at once. I bet I would not believe it, even though I probably touch most of the crates that come through here at least once. We all do. It's only for these couple of months that the quantities are so huge. At the moment we have four cooler spaces filled pretty full, plus a lot of tomatoes sitting outside waiting to be sold in the next few days. By the middle of the week there will be nearly complete turn-over, and most of that food will be eaten, and we will start to fill the coolers again toward the end of the week.
I just had to get that out of my system before I get to the butterscotch pudding. So, I have written many times over the years about where we live and how it all works, but I am pretty sure that I am the only person I know who gets a container of homemade butterscotch pudding delivered to her refrigerator nearly once a week. It all comes from knowing the right people -- for a lifetime. To be more precise, knowing the right person.
So now I can talk about my friend Betsy, the source of the pudding. She and I share a lot of food affinities. We like custards and trifle and ginger snaps and fritattas and soups and casseroles that have good proportions of excellent vegetables in them. She has been part of this informal milk buying group for at least a decade -- I order the milk from a local dairy that delivers to the refrigerator on our porch and I collect the money once a year from all the people who participate. Betsy always seems to have surplus milk, since the milk drinkers in her house come and go, and changing the order seems too cumbersome. Lately she has been making butterscotch pudding, too much of it, and I live right across the way from her and I win the pudding lottery.
Betsy and I go back all the way to elementary school. We were in the same third/fourth grade class but I don't remember that, and then we were in the same fifth grade class with Mr. Fred Butler and that's when we started to be friends. In sixth grade our friendship solidified around writing for the school newspaper and other shared interests that I don't remember, but she did come out to the farm to work/play for days at a time. We were never in school together after the sixth grade and yet we are friends today, 51 years later. And you want to know the secret? Letter writing. We were both good letter writers and we stayed in touch for long enough that we didn't forget each other. After college she and her husband moved to DC and they started to invite us to their annual Christmas party. Then we started a book club that lasted twenty years, and that really cemented this friendship. Meanwhile we talked them into joining the group that created Blueberry Hill, and the rest is current events. Current events: helping to keep this neighborhood in good working order, cooking and eating, shared leftovers at our Wednesday lunches, a different book club, talking about our kids, talking about our work, talking about our husbands. Just what people do who have known each other forever.
I could say a lot about Betsy but she is still alive and we are still making memories together so it's not time for a wrap-up. She lost both her parents in the last year and has been working on creating memorial events for them, so the whole idea of a wrap-up is very much on her mind. We still have a lot more meals to share and jokes to enjoy. No eulogy yet. We will know each other until the end of our lives, and it is really not about the butterscotch pudding. That's a bonus, and she will probably start making something else soon because she likes to try new recipes. Since we like the same foods, this can only be a good thing.
There are a lot of people in my life that I have known for many decades, but Betsy is the only one who is still a friend from elementary school. She is the only person who remembers Mary Alice Farrell Jackson, our teacher who threw chalk when people were talking in the back of the room. We do remember quite a few of the characters from our sixth grade class, and this definitely makes our friendship unique, even if those memories don't come up very often. It is a special thing to have a Betsy.
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