Birthday thoughts

Plastic tablecloth with its vertical blue stripes across its surface shouldn’t remind me of her -  can’t image that she’d ever have placed one on the laminex table set with a small square of yellow butter in a round, cut-glass dish - slices of triangular bread on a plate for bread’nbutter after dinner or during, whatever you prefer. Though what we preferred was dipping our fingers into cold butter then quickly into the sugar bowl where the  sweet, white crystals would stick & straight into the mouth when she wasn’t looking. But she imagined the fingerprints as scrapes of a tiger’s claw on its soft surface – forever marred. You might as well eat the lot! Glares at us with those piercing gray eyes, as though we had committed the crime of the century. She wouldn’t have a bar of anything we’d had our grubby mits in and told everyone we never washed our hands. Waste of good money when we should have been content with cold dripping on toast she'd meticulously collected in a tin each week after the Sunday roast. But for me it was the meat juice that ran like a thin vein through the deep white fat and settled at the bottom like slaughterhouse sediment that made it unpalatable. Something about birthday's (and today is my birthday) that reminds me of this. Perhaps it's the making of a cake and the small pleasure of licking out the bowl, bestowed only on the one willing to help on baking day.