“That old ‘But-tuh’” (By Doug Fincher)

February 26, 2018 - I can barely remember my maternal Great-grandmother and Grandfather Holt. When I was four years old (1937), we lived in a small house across the road from them near Center, Texas. Grandpaw had a long white beard and my only memory of him was watching him swat flies with his home-made fly swatter one day. Grandmaw had just put freshly churned butter in a plate on the kitchen table. When a fly lit on it, Grandpaw buried the hapless insect with one swat and scattered butter all over the table. ““Ha Ha!!” , he laughed as Grandmaw wildly cleaned up the table. 

Mother once told me a story that my Great-grandmother once told her. Grandamaw said that since they had no electricity to keep them cool, she and Grandpaw would often sleep on their screened-in back porch but they could never get rid of the mosquitoes. “We’d rub our bodies with old, rancid cow butter to keep them away”, she said. “One night I couldn’t Grandpaw to sleep in the porch bed with me.” “I think it was that ‘old but-tuh’ I had on”, she said.

When we ten kids were growing up never knew what old “but-tuh” looked…. or smelled like. With ten of us sitting around the table, our butter never had a chance to get rancid…and we would have never dreamed of wasting it on anything …

……..except a hot biscuit.