The price of butter...

My mother used to talk about the price of butter. As a young woman I couldn’t understand what she was talking abut. We weren’t poor. So why did the apparently high price of butter mean so much to her and upset her as much as it did? As I’ve aged I find myself doing the same thing. Only for me, it’s ice cream. I can’t remember the price differential that so appalled my mother. But when I was growing up, ice cream was 10 cents - eleven if you added jimmies or as today’s youth might call them, sprinkles. Now it’s common for that same single scoop to cost anywhere between 3 and 5 dollars. Fifty-plus years of living and I’m accustomed to prices changing as I have. But ice cream remains the memory of my youth. It’s a child’s dream of life being forever the same. And for me, as butter was for my mom, I gasp at shelling out 5 bucks for the metaphoric dessert. In my still-young heart, I think the world should have remained the same, and ice cream, irrational as it may seem, should still be 10 cents. It’s not the money; it’s the loss of the dream. Life really does move on in ways a child - or the child residing in each of us - finds totally incomprehensible.