Dear Bread Fans,
I wonder how you’ve been. I wonder about everything as the daylight shrinks to nubs, and the weather is as unpredictable as a teenager. It is pouring rain and fifty degrees here in upstate New York, and Monday it was snowy and freezing.
I’m getting ready to join my husband in Seattle, where he’s been since before Thanksgiving. This means we’ve skipped the holiday routines, of fetching a Seussical tree, regrowing from a stump at a sheep farmers’ abandoned Christmas tree lot. I’ve made some Viennese crescent cookies, but mostly, I’ve been trying to finish things. I brought the leeks in from the yard and made a mad dash to finish a long essay about my father and his penchant for not finishing renovations, or short stories. Then I attacked the mending pile, because I wanted to get that down to nothing before I made Christmas presents. In the process, I forgot about the leeks. When I finally got to them, many were slick with decay. They’d gone soupy, without my ever making soup.
The end of the year, packing for a trip: these things push me to the finish line. I’ve cleaned out the fridge. Paired nearly all the socks. Made a bunch of bread for the freezer so when I get home and have surgery on my knee – just a clean-up, not a replacement – I’ll be ready for a million sandwiches. I brought four bags to the thrift store and couldn’t resist shopping. I found a pile of quilt squares, folded over, and taped together. I hesitated buying it because I didn’t care for the pink and blue on top. In the fluorescent lighting, it made me think the stack would be unappealing. Thank goodness I didn’t listen to my doubt.
The twenty-eight squares of colorful stripes, plaids and patterns are all hand-stitched. Some of the pieces are scraps patched together. I wonder if the original cloth was old shirts. I think they’re from the 1930s or 40s. The fabric is thin and slightly faded, and I’m scared to wash or sew it. I’ll need a mentor for this project. I’m not a quilter, just someone who likes to sew things together.
This ‘book’ of quilt pages sat overnight on my table with the weight of someone’s life. Making coffee, I felt the presence of the person who made these squares. I wonder who she was, and what her life was like. I’m assuming she was a woman, even though my friend Howard told me that his grandfather and grandmother made his family quilts. I’m going to post about the squares on social media, to see if someone knows the story of this person. I’m sure she finished other quilts – and aprons, napkins, dresses, and pants. I’m sure her mending pile always had clothes ready for her attention, and that she knew there would be no end.
I tackled my mending seeking completion. Writing is infinite. I stitch words into sentences and pages, cut out phrases, and ditch entire drafts. If my words travel to readers, the exchange is ephemeral. Quilting, like baking, yields more tangible results. Start with ingredients, and soon or eventually, there will be something to share. But the food and its maker, like the quilt and its maker, will vanish, same as the ear tuned to my words, and anyone else’s. Our footholds are fragile.
Yet what we read has staying power. Saturday, I was at the farmers’ market giving away my food memory box zine. A friend came up and said the interview I did with Kim Foster made him burst into tears. Our conversation had articulated so much he’s been trying to convey about food and other choices; he’d been trying to tell people that external limits keep people from safe housing and healthy eating, not morals or knowledge, or lack of it. Invisible structures keep everyone from “just” preferring healthier foods over (widely-available & highly affordable) processed food.
I love this example of how words live in our imagination. Kim Foster’s marvelous book Meth Lunches sat with me & now the interview sits in other minds, sending folks to read the book – I hope.
In honor of the power of books, I have a few more to recommend:
All Things Edible, Random & Odd: Essays on Grief, Love & Food by Sheila Squillante. I love this memoir in essays, and how the author tends to her father, and her feelings for him, through words and food. You can read from it here, on LitHub.
The Rye Bread Marriage by Michaele Weissman is a memoir with incredible bread details. As she investigates her husband’s connections to Latvian rye bread, she learns and shares so much about rye history and bread history.
We of Little Faith: Why I Stopped Pretending to Believe (and Maybe You Should Too) by Kate Cohen. I would recommend this book even if I didn’t know Kate, and love her bread and soup. Kate interrogates her thinking about atheism, and what it is to be a non-believer in America in a way that begs us to consider our individual and collective attitudes towards religion. Alan Alda interviewed her!
Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women by Alissa Wilkinson. (This is one of my serendipitous finds on Libby, the app for ebooks & audiobooks connected to your library. While browsing through a list of nonfiction titles at a virtual library is NOTHING like going to the actual library and hopscotching around the stacks, I’ve found some terrific titles skimming Libby.) I like this series of small biographies about Ella Baker, Alice B. Toklas, Hannah Arendt, Octavia Butler, Agnes Varda, Elizabeth David, Edna Lewis, Maya Angelou, and Laurie Colwin that make up this book.
Last but not least, I want to recommend any and everything by THE power couple of fiction, Elizabeth McCracken and Edward Carey. Their books are delicious reads, full of realistic settings that skew odd. Edith Holler is Carey’s latest, a Dickensian feeling oddity about a girl who lives inside her family theater. In McCracken’s “Birdsong from the Radio,” a short story from the collection The Souvenir Museum, a mother goes to a bakery she used to frequent with her children. She sits at a table and eats challah, and the spectacle is hard for others to bear. The bread does a lot of emotional work, just as in our very real lives, and I hope you’ll read it!
Yours,
Amy
Thank you for the book recommendation. I just downloaded "We of little faith" to my kindle. Sounds like an appropriate reading for the holidays 🤣. I just bought a bunch of rye berries for milling for my bread. Right now I have 100 g sprouting to make sprouted rye flour. Sourdough is my meditation - it grounds me and keeps me from increasing depression. Seattle is gray and wet and full of homeless people--totally depressing. We only go there for doctors' visits (I live 45 minutes from there in "normal" traffic). I feel like I need blinders to enjoy a night out in the city. It's sad, but true. I hope your Seattle stay is more positive. Do something in nature if you can; we have a lot of awesome trails in the area. Bring a raincoat & a hat!! And let us know your Seattle experience. 😉 Happy holidays to you & good luck with the knee!
Hi Amy et. all.....safe trip and wishing you well on your surgery. B