vetrardagur

Much rain today, a colorless day of thick gray clouds near the ground, cool damp air of the kind that makes me wish I could spend the morning soaking in the heitir pottar of Vesturbæjarlaug.

I recall soaking in one of them and half-listening to the chatter of the folk around me. Something struck my ear and I began to listen in earnest. They were much older than I. They recalled an earlier Iceland. Instantly I wished I had been listening all the while. One man recounted having been a boy in the countryside. Another enumerated the many different kinds and colors of butter that he remembered from his youth, some very sour, others very dark, all according to their age and the time of year.

The other day I remembered the fact of white winter butter, but just as quickly I forgot about it. Not five minutes ago I remembered it again. Before we colored winter butter to make it yellow like summer butter, it was white. Our yellow butter has an unnatural hue, like the young people at Vesturbæjarlaug who frequent the tanning beds year-round and emerge from the changing rooms weirdly golden in January, making the rest of us seem blue-white in our paleness.

Yellow butter makes sense in the summertime, when buttercups and sóleyjar bloom. But I think I would prefer winter butter white and cool, in keeping with that season. Or I would if I did not keep forgetting that it had ever existed.