Dear Bread

A wish or two

Dear Readers,

I call this Dear Bread, because I really wish I could write to bread, and that bread would write me back. I'd love to be pen pals with this thing that has fed us for millennia. If I could write my favorite food, here’s what I’d say today:

Why can't you be the metaphor we've made you? We believe you are more than food. You represent our connections, from farmer to miller to baker, from earth to mouth. The idea of you shows our reliance upon each other, and the need to work for a common good.

I wish that what you represent, Dear Bread -- our necessity to each other, the way we literally have to help and feed each other -- was acknowledged as more than a symbol, because our differences are tearing us to pieces.

---

Since I cannot correspond with bread, I have you.

Tuesday night I didn’t follow the election results, so when I heard them Wednesday morning, I felt my heart sink. My chest was heavy with the news.

I checked on my family. I cleaned the kitchen, brought the chicken food and compost out, and started to head up the hill to find Howard, a friend I haven't seen in too long. But first, I decided to rake the leaves on the sidewalk. They'd been building up and it felt great to clear the path, to shove leaves, yellow and crispy, into a giant paper bag.

Another friend stopped by and asked if I was going to see Joy Harjo. I had no idea she was coming to Troy! What a balm.

After walking with Howard, I went to the community college and sat in the back of an auditorium, full of students and people from the community. It was comforting to see friends in the crowd. Joy Harjo is a citizen of the Muscogee Creek Nation and was our national poet laureate for three terms. She's also a musician and playwright. She talked about tricksters and how we will find our way home, because we have a built-in homing instinct -- an instinct she names in the first poem she read, “For Calling the Spirit Back From Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet.”

This line really stuck with me:

"Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial postelection jitters."

The word postelection was a swap for insecure, as you can see here in the full text of the poem. That link includes Harjo reading the poem, too.

As the news settled in me, I thought of my dad a lot. The desire to talk with him kept flitting around inside me, like a butterfly. I ate crackers with peanut butter and butter, a mashup of my parents' comfort foods.

Another butterfly inside me is the desire to make pie. To feel the skin of dough thinning under my rolling pin. I don’t have an audience for pie right now, and I’ve been craving making bread, so I considered making yeast from some saved potato water, but once I looked the recipe up and realized I didn’t have any hops, well, I went full 21st century and used the potato water for bread.

I was daunted by Mrs. Parloa’s recipe, which is strikingly similar to another I read in The White House Cook Book, which I referred to last week.

Mrs Parloa was a famous cooking instructor. This book is from 1887.

Thursday, even though I wanted to mope on the sofa, I went to a reading & fundraiser, BraVa!, put on by the fabulous memoir instructor (and author) Marion Roach Smith for the YWCA-GCR. (Marion Roach Smith started the event when her family adopted a family at the Y and the mother requested a bra for her Christmas gift. After 9 years, 4500 bras have been collected through this reading series!!)

Hearing Starletta Renee, the director of the Y, talk about the necessity of us protecting each other, and listening to people read stories about bras and everything they hold, well, it was again, just what I needed. Words, and people, and love.

Where are you finding people and love?

What are you baking?

Amy

YWCA-GCR Director Starletta Renee with the bras the audience brought to the fundraiser.

PS: If you are local, please come write with me next Saturday November 16th at the Hart Cluett Museum from 1-4 p.m. We’ll be using prompts based on stuff I’m finding in the archives. Especially interesting are a couple of charity cookbooks from the early 1900s. Whoo boy.

We'll begin our time together with tea and sweets, and the writing can take any shape you'd like: an exploration of personal food memories, or small pieces of fiction/creative nonfiction. 

No experience is necessary -- just curiosity, and a desire to play with words through the lens of food. If you do have a notebook and pen you like to use, or prefer to write digitally, bring these along. Otherwise, we will have paper and pens available.

Registration and materials- $35

Scholarships available! Reach out to Amanda at airwin@hartcluett.org

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