Does a Body Good

There is a dairy farm somewhere in Morgan County, Ut that my parents have bought their milk from for years. The milkman comes twice a week at some absurdly early hour in the morning bringing the freshest, most delicious milk one could ask for (I believe it is called RoseMary Dairy, or Rose Hill, or Rose whatever - that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet). Being raised on it, I was always spoiled. The problem, however, was that I naturally became accustomed to it and, consequently, store-bought milk just never did it for me. Upon moving out of the house, however, I was forced to allow store-bought milk to do it for me and, like all things, after a while, the store-bought became customary.

Latvian milk is a different story. It has this strange, almost earthy, aftertaste - as if you had just put your mouth on a dirty, udder nipple and sucked the milk out yourself. This first month, I have not drunk (drank? drunken?) much milk. This week, however, was a milestone week in that for the first time I drank some milk and thought, "hey, there's no dirty, udder flavor...." Congratulatory remarks to me. (You know, the more I think about this, the more I realize how the tenses of "to drink" form outright weird words. Drank? I mean, that is a strange word when given some thought.)

The best thing about Latvian milk is that it doesn't come as the usual Skim, 1%, 2%, and Whole. No, no; they have 0.5%, 1%, 1.5%, 2%, 2.3%, 2.8%, 3.5% and, a whopping 3.8%, which is currently stocked in my refrigerator. There is so much more variety to choose from. Why anyone needs such a rather arbitrarily wide selection I'm not really sure. But I am not complaining as the 3.8% feels so good going down.

The only problem I have to deal with now, however, is that milk only comes in volumes of 1 lt and 1.5 lt. So, just like with everything else, I have to go to the store seemingly ever other day.