More milk

i don't normally repeat myself like this but... y'know... i spent a whole day shooting exploding milk... so I figure i might as well... ahem... milk it for all it's worth

I have an uneasy history with milk. It was ever-present in our lives when I was growing up. My mom always had a milk cow on the go and our front porch housed the (scary music, please) separator... a complex concoction of metal rings and discs and heavy whirring parts and octopus-ish arms.

In many ways, the separator was our friend. It sorted out the skim milk, which we gave to the pigs and chickens, and left us with cream, which... in addition to the usual uses for cream... my mom turned into butter and, even better, ice cream. The downsides were these:

1. My sisters and I had to wash and dry that complex fucker every day. Oy. This included taking it apart with a wrench-like thing, and then scrubbing and drying all those countless bits of metal. The discs were the worst. We all despised them. There were twelve... each a cone-shaped piece of metal with raised rounded rivets, in which bits of milk and cream would hide and cling and resist attempts to rout them.

2. The smell. No matter how well we cleaned the separator and its supports and its living quarters, I could always detect a lingering animal smell of milk. Inevitably, some tiny splash would end up somewhere we hadn't thought of cleaning, and would sour, and... lucky me; I happen to have inherited the nose of a blood hound. I can smell a dime-sized drop of sour milk at 200 paces. And... even today... I have zero tolerance for any kind of sour milk product - yogurt, sour cream, cottage cheese, etc. I'm gagging just writing this.

Yesterday, after my shooting (and smashing and splashing) I got to work cleaning up the mess. And some of the milk had, of course, dried. And it was warm. And the smell was... just like the old days.

Funny. In the barn, as the milk was coming out of the cow in long white streaks, I found that smell comforting and sweet and homey. Take it indoors and it's a whole 'nother story. I have not been able to stomach drinking milk since some time in my teens. These days (as mentioned with the previous pic) I mainly enjoy its visual properties.