Five # Brick of Cheese

Sunday I made grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup for lunch. It's my very favorite lunch and I think that goes back to my mom making it for us when I was young. I didn't enjoy it as much as I usually do.. The soup was homemade tomato-basil (something I never had time to make when the kids were home), the bread was toasted perfectly (another thing that rarely happened when I was grilling in bulk) and the cheese was melted to perfection so it should have been the perfect lunch. I think the reason I couldn't enjoy it was that I kept thinking about the cheese.
I have bought Tillamook cheese in five pound bricks for so many years that I no longer remember what other sizes cheese comes in. When I we needed cheese, I never had to think about what to buy, it was always the five pound brick and if by chance anyone else was doing the shopping they knew automatically which cheese to buy. Sunday, when I got the brick of cheese out to slice it for our sandwiches, I noticed that it had mold around the edges. Now, mold doesn't bother me, I have cut mold off the cheese many times before when one brick has been pushed to the back of the refridgerator and a new one (okay, many new cheeses) have been come and gone before the old one is discovered encased in mold but still "good on the inside". No, it wasn't the mold that bothered me, it was reallizing that I would no longer be able to buy those five pound bricks of cheese, and that meant that I would be buying small sizes of everything else.
I have bought things in bulk for so long I no longer know how to shop in two-people quantities. As a mom to seven children, grocery shopping was a very major ordeal and I took the job of learning to feed my family nutritious meals on a budget very seriously. My job as family procurement officer took a large time committment. I learned to make menus so we would have mostly balanced meals, I made shopping lists and then searched the grocery adds, clipped coupons and watched for seasonal sales. As the family grew I would buy in larger and larger quantities and as the family got smaller I still shopped the same way. Now I have a two quart bottle of ketsup in the refridgerator alongside the half gallon Miracle Whip jar and I doubt I'll be making many hamburgers for just my husband and I.
As I ate my grilled cheese sandwich I thought about passing the cheese aisle with my shopping cart (who am I kidding, I'll only need one of those plastic baskets from now on)and trying to figure out what package of cheese to buy. I thought of all the other shopping decisions that had been so automatic that I would now have to think about and how they would remind me that I was no longer feeding the hungry masses. I would like to write that new vistas of variety and choices opened up in my mind as I comtemplated buying something other than cheddar, but it wasn't so. Instead, I was sad and felt like saying good bye to that big brick of cheese was like giving up an old friend. Writing about it today, it seems silly, but that's how it felt Sunday and it ruined the taste of my sandwich.