It is a warm sunny day, the temperature has been in the mid 30s, high 80s for you who are still thinking in Fahrenheit, since 11.30 this morning. The light is improving and if it is like yesterday it will be gorgeous in a couple of hours thick and vital, in the late evening the light here is often crystal clear but at times it seems to have its own special density, a strange extra dimension that gives it the abilty to enhance everything it touches. It is wonderous, but inevitably undescribable, succulent, rich and opulent, it is reason I live here.

I have been having a house cleaning day, bachelors have them you know, we like to pretend we never do any house work, but there are days when cleaning and tidying just get into your soul and won’t let you go. Today I have cleaned both the kitchen and the bathroom, though at different times. By clean I mean a thorough clean, a long term bachelor I have learned to clean as I go mostly, however sometimes it needs going over a bit more intensely. I have also swept the house out, done all the backlog of laundry and tidied my office. I do not think most people realise just how many photos a professional wildlife photographer takes in an average day, and when you do your own developing and printing as well it can very quickly come to be exceedingly cluttered.

In anticipation of the fact that I plan to be out shooting a few rolls of film around the lake at what would normally be the time for my evening meal I am preparing some of my meal in advance so that when I return it will not be too late before I get to eat. Besides cutting and trimming the vegetables and sitting them waiting in the steamer I have sliced up a banana and opened a can of condensed milk. The two go together very well. However it was a surprise for me a few weeks ago when, subsequent to searching my mind for some alternative to fruit salad that would still involve some of the fresh fruit so abundantly available here, that I spotted a tin of condensed milk on the shelf of the local supermarket and remembered bananas in condensed milk.

This was something my mother used to feed me right up until I left home and I had loved it even as a young adult, though it had been long forgotten in the student days and the following years of alternate bouts of restaurant adopting and self catering. Yes I thought, why not give it a try, so I added the tin of condensed milk to my small collection of supplies and finished my shopping.

I had banana squish, as we used to call it, that evening, and thoroughly enjoyed it. The next day I enjoyed it again and that was the end of the current stock of bananas. A couple of days later I tried making peach squish and this worked fine and some days after that I made apple and then pear squish, neither of these two worked quite so well but they were still reasonably edible to my personal, and perhaps quirky, tastes. I should explain that the dish is called squish because you simple squish the fruit and the condensed milk up together. The resulting sweet sticky pulp is eaten with a spoon.

That was the first tin, today I opened the second tin, poured a little over the banana and tipped the rest into a container to keep it in the fridge, I do not like leaving food in tins, even in a clean hygienic fridge. As was always the case, even though I left the tin balanced across the top of the storage container for a good 5 minutes it failed to drain properly, a thin but additively substantial film of condensed milk remained evenly adhering to the inside of the tin. As I wiped my fingers around the inside of the tin and then licked the condensed milk off them I was transported back in time.

Condensed milk has always had this tendency which caused it to become the basis of a game between my mother and I when I was younger, a game that continued all through my teenage years. Whenever mother was cooking one of the dishes in which she used condensed milk, or when she opened a tin to make squish for me I would insist on cleaning this last film of sweetness out of the tin. Early on mother had explained to me that I was doing something useful by this action because if she threw it in the garbage as it was it would attract flies. So being a health conscious child I held her to this for years. However this did not stop her from trying to drain the tin as completely as possible and often she would make me wait an extra few minutes for the last drop to fall. She would tease me that next time she would succeed in emptying the tin completely. This became a game with ‘variations on a theme’ that we played and it was part of the love between us that it was always fun and that I always got some condensed milk.

I remembered strongly one particular afternoon I came home, greeted my mother, noted she was cooking one of those meals, then rushed up stairs. I was back down again shortly however to claim my prize. An integral part of the beauty of condensed milk is that the film left behind is always perfectly even and smooth. So I was surprised on this occasion that it was all swirled around like I had already been eating it. I immediately jumped to a conclusion and accused my mother of experimenting with finger lickin’ good condensed milk. She looked surprised that I should suggest this so I explained about the nature of the film.

She laughed gently and said, “Oh well, you might as well hear the truth you are a big boy now”. “I forgot you were coming home so early today.” She said. “And so I washed the tin out. But then when you arrived, knowing how much you love it I put some back in and smoothed it around a bit with a spoon.”

This was an astounding tale, one which effected me profoundly in the living moment. A huge bubble of love burst open in my heart spilling its contents all over my soul. I swept my mother into my arms and kissed her forehead and her nose. “I love you!” I told her, “You are the best mother ever, in the whole world, the best ever”. Then I hugged her some more while the tears rolled down her cheeks.

It was not long after that that I left home for college and condensed milk slowly slipped out of my life, or so I thought until recently, but now I wonder. How can I ever have thought I could leave my mothers love behind me somewhere just by growing up and moving to a different country, as if love was limited to a time and place like the various material objects we use to express it.