Crafting the Tear

by Lisa Ostman (Australia)

I didn't expect to find Netherlands

Until that day, I had thought there were only two types of tears: happy and sad. I never expected to discover the rest whilst visiting a cheese farm tucked into the rural part of the Netherlands. There were three threads of fate that called me into the quaint building: the weather, my curiosity and a starving stomach. Shaking the rain off my boots and removing my hood, the growing darkness outside was contrasted against the warm wooden oasis inside. It was quiet enough that even our raincoats seemed like a rude intrusion into the serenity. Husband and wife team, Lucas and Lotte, owned the farm. They seemed to have been adopted by the building’s encompassing silence more than they themselves had sought it out. Lucas was an unassuming and kindly man with a salt and pepper beard whose voice reverberated from his belly as firm as the wood that every cranny in the building was made of. Lotte was a woman not present but crafted in our memories through Lucas’ loving words in the same way his hands carved us a pair of beautifully ornate clogs. “I like the quiet away from the city,” Lucas explained to our group, whose own Sydney-based origins found us adapting to the surroundings in wilful defeat. We were led into a room with wheels of cheese shelved up to the roof and told to sample as many as we wanted. My stomach quickly took control, flavours of cheddar ranging from chives and onion to sweet plum melting into one. We stopped when we reached the room where the magic happened. Lucas talked us through the cheese-making process as much as we could pay attention to, though the overwhelming scent of cheese threatened to all but envelope the senses. I remember but one fact: there is one stage in the cheese making process that requires a continuous manual stirring on the part of Lucas and his son. It was in that room that he passed onto us a gift in the form of a story. Through words, he painted the scene of the day his wife fell ill, trapped in bed for the week in a harsh rain like the one we had encountered. But Lotte had one particular cheese she loved: the chilli flake cheddar. So as the sun was just pulling apart the curtain of dawn, Lucas and his son had huddled into the stirring room and rolled up their sleeves. They had spent hours making a new batch of cheese. The only problem: during the stirring process, the chilli flakes that give the cheese its unique flavour float lazily into the air. In a tight wooden room with only one window, the flakes began to pile up, until Lucas was squinting the chilli out of his eyes. Muscles heaving and sweat building, him and his son had to dangle close over the cheese to even stir the mixture properly. Rubbing their eyes proved hazardous as flakes begun to coat their fingers. Yet they laboured until nature took its course and tears desperately tried to clear their eyes for them. Hard, heavy tears that still continued even with the ending of the days work. Holding the finished block of cheese for his wife only made them fall heavier. Yes, they were tears of happiness and of sadness for his wife’s sickness. But they were also tears of hard work; the collective tears of two men huddled together in a day’s work, determined to finish. “The tears proved the job was done,” Lucas had said with a shrug and smile, before leading us back to the main room and to our own devices. According to Lucas’ account his wife’s health had improved because of that one block of cheddar. I don’t believe that it was the cheese itself that helped. Somewhere in that patch of the Netherlands, surrounded by rolling fields of dipping sunshine and rain, they had managed to find a slice of good no matter the weather. In the sampling room I spied the chilli flake cheddar block. Walking up to it, I took a measured bite. For the first time that evening, I truly tasted what it was made of.