That which creates can also destroy.  It sounds a bit ominous, I know, but it rings true in both cheese and families.

You can’t have cheese without mold, a certain amount can make a cheese yummy and creamy and…well, cheese. But there are times the mold takes over, ruins the cheese, makes it just mold. When cheese becomes rotten, the mold is no longer an enhancement or what supports the flavor. The mold can become too much, too ugly and it begins to eat the cheese, feed off of it for it’s own benefit.

The oddity is cheese comes from the mold, great cheese ages in the mold. It counts on the mold to help create it’s initial flavor. But the key to cheese making is balance and at some point the mold has to pull back and allow a particular cheese to bask in it’s unique flavor, pair itself with some crackers of it’s own or a good wine.  If there’s no balance in this process, the cheese can become smothered in the needs of the mold and instead of being a cheese in it’s own right, it becomes food for the mold and nothing more.  There’s a natural balance, a fine tuned process that allows for the survival of both the mold and the cheese.

Families are like mold.  When they are healthy, it takes simple ingredients and with time, patience and history, so many wonderful varieties of cheese are created.  But when families turn toxic, mean, hurtful and they are rooted in disrespect and hatred…it ruins the spirit, the essence, the flavor and the mold must be cut off to save what is left of the cheese.

My thoughts from the laundry room.  Restless Sleep.

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