A Pail of Cream

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

As a writer, I have led two lives. In my guise as a historian, I have published carefully documented books and essays about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America, using the first person singular only in prefaces. But over the same span of years, I have had a second, less visible life as a personal essayist. In dozens of short pieces—descriptive, argumentative, satiric, and occasionally sentimental—I have written about everything from the interpretation of a New Testament verse to standing in line in a fabric store. Most of these pieces have appeared in periodicals associated with the "unsponsored sector" of contemporary Mormonism, a loosely related group of intellectuals, writers, and feminists linked to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In most places, when a stranger comes up to me and says, "I loved your book," I assume they mean A Midwife's Tale, my history of the eighteenth-century Maine midwife Martha Ballard. In Mormon country, the same comment often refers to All God's Critters Got a Place in the Choir, a collection of essays coauthored with the Utah poet Emma Lou Thayne.1	1
Sometime in fifth grade, I decided I wanted to be a writer. When I was in high school I began submitting my best poems to Seventeen, cherishing the occasional words of encouragement I received with rejection slips. In my senior year, the editors invited me to write a short piece for a feature on how teens in various parts of the United States celebrated Christmas. I suppose they picked me because I lived in a town with a name that evoked the smell of cookies baking, even though it was named for a sugar beet factory that had long since closed. "Sugar City Magic" was published in December 1957 during the first quarter of my sophomore year at the University of Utah.	2
For the most part Seventeen's editors were satisfied with my effort to turn the mundane facts of life in a small western town into local color. They kept my description of my dad buying Christmas nuts at the Sugar City Mercantile, "a combination grocery store, butcher shop, shoe store, dry goods store, dress shop and summer fishing headquarters," and my reference to an elderly neighbor who came to our house on the day before Christmas "with her traditional present: sugared doughnuts." But they balked at the sentence that described "the youngest sheep farmer" in town bringing us a gift of lamb chops for Christmas morning breakfast. In the published version that became "The youngest dairyman in our neighborhood arrived with a pail of thick cream for our Christmas morning breakfast."2 I hooted at that pail of cream, telling everybody I knew that it was a New York fantasy, that the dairy farmers in Sugar City used milking machines, sold most of their milk in bulk to the farmers' co-op, and refrigerated the rest in narrow-necked glass bottles with paper caps. The cream rose to the top, leaving a band of yellow above the thin blue milk. It did not come in pails.	3
In truth, the editor's pail of cream was only slightly more fanciful than my lamb chops. One of our neighbors did run a huge sheep-raising operation, and on occasion his son had brought us a nice rack of chops at Christmastime, but I never remember eating them for breakfast. My mother contributed that ethnographic detail. She claimed that some Idaho ranchers she knew as a child fried lamb for breakfast, and she thought it quite possible that our neighbors did so as well. I did not question the story any more than I second-guessed my own memories. I did not manufacture details, but I rearranged them, compressing every interesting thing I had ever done on Christmas or in the days or weeks surrounding it into two fun-packed days. If there really had been a blizzard on December 23 like the one with which I opened the essay, nobody could have driven to the Sand Hills on Christmas Day, nor could we have heard "the clip-clop of the horses' hoofs" on the sleigh ride I described at the end. Forty years later, that sleigh ride seems even more problematic than the pail of cream. I think I did ride in a hay-filled wagon once in my teens, but this description had more to do with the imagined wonderland of 1950s popular music than with my life in a wind-swept Idaho town. The New York editors wanted small-town "magic." I was happy to oblige.	. . .