Spring 2020

Well, how are we all doing, I emerge to ask.  ♥  'Not even four full months into it, but this has been such a trying year in my own little world, every month a new heartache and stressor, and now all this. . .in the larger world for us all.  Ay yi yi!  We focus on the positive as much as we can, though, don't we, and we plod on as always.  2001 still holds the record as the worst year of my life--24 was a humdinger--and I never think of it without remembering that a couple weeks before it finally (Thank God) ended, I was stunned to find myself getting excited about painting pink snowflakes onto my Christmas cards' envelopes before I mailed them:  If I could still get blissfully lost in creativity, even in a project as simple as painting snowflakes onto my outgoing mail, then obviously, this sometimes-devastatingly awful world hadn't beaten me.  My heart may have been broken many-times-over that year, I realized, but it was still there and still a good one, and I would be okay.  These silly bunny-shaped dinner rolls this Sunday were the 2020 version of 2001's hand-painted snowflakes.

"Next time, I'll knead the dough a little longer," I told Mike as we sampled a couple Easter afternoon.  (Why?  I think they're good, he responds.)  "Maybe I'll scratch on some whiskers with a cake-tester or toothpick next time so they look more like bunnies."  (He nods while he eats.)  "And I think I'll pinch little puffs of dough out of the backs for tails."  (More nodding and eating.)  "Anyway, they have potential, but they could be cuter."  If I'm already looking forward to the next batch of bunny rolls and to future Easters that will find us sharing our meals with our families again, hope is still alive and well here, despite furloughs, family layoffs, face masks, and the seemingly-constant BREAKING! NEWS! that mark all these spring days.  I keep you all in my heart and wish you your own dinner roll revelations, whatever it is you need to keep yourself going. 

(Always love.) 

♥

Brighter Days and French Breads

"The shortest day has passed, 

and whatever nastiness of weather 

we may look forward to in January and February, 

 at least we notice that the days are getting longer.  

Minute by minute they lengthen out.  

It takes some weeks before we become aware of the change.  

It is imperceptible even as the growth of a child, 

as you watch it day by day, 

 until the moment comes when with a start of delighted surprise 

we realize that we can stay out of doors 

in a twilight lasting for another quarter of a precious hour."
~  Vita Sackville-West, 

December 30th, 1956

♥

I love that passage.  Right now at five-o'clock, it is still light out.  I'm not minding January this year.  Some years, as they say, are better than others.  Last year, almost everything about the month got on my nerves, or so I remember it.  This January finds me feeling hopeful and cozy.  Three loaves of Glenda's French bread are in the middle of their second rise and will soon be placed in the oven to go with tonight's supper--it feels like a soup and bread night here--so the scents of yeast and flour are in the air.  Love.  The last time I made French bread, it was 2001 and I had just turned twenty-four.  I used my grandmother's recipe and ended up with ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! dozens?! of small and almost-inedible loaves.  Grandma had died just a few weeks before and I tried to honor her by making her bread for a family dinner.  Bad, brokenhearted timing, and after hours of kneading, punching-down, forming loaves, and baking:  Bad, brokenhearted bread too.  I trust that tonight's loaves will be better.   The smell of homemade bread, in all the bread's stages, always takes me back to my grandparents' kitchen outside of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania.  Just before sliding her loaves into the oven, Grandma would slice a small X into the top of each one.  One Baking Day while I was staying with at my grandparents' house, I decided to add the finishing touch of a letter V to each of the loaves, and Grandma was first perplexed and then amused.  Few things taste as good as fresh bread with butter, and the smell of the loaves instantly transports me back to Grandma's apron-covered side.  It is always--likely forever and always--almost impossible to believe that if I went to my grandparents' house at any given moment, that I wouldn't find them there.  Surely, Grandma is nodding off a bit in her armchair right now as I write this and thinking every time she wakes that she really needs to get up and put together a little supper for her and Papa.  Surely, Papa keeps walking from the back porch to check the thermometer to the kitchen to look out the window at the snow.  If I called right now, I would wake Grandma from her catnap, but she would be tickled to hear from me, and we would want to hear that the other was staying warm and would ask what the other was making for supper.  She would tell me what she and Papa might watch on television that evening--usually a nature program--and would mention that Papa would be walking down to the post office in the morning to mail her next letter to me.  I would tell her that I'm taking down the Christmas tree tonight and that Stuffed has been stretched out like a piece of gum along the bedroom radiator all day.  We would say "I love you" before hanging up and soon we would both settle down to our simple meals of homemade soup and French bread.  

Thanksgiving 2008 ~ Bread Dough Cornucopia ♥

My favorite thing in a long time that I've cooked or baked, this cornucopia is made of bread dough. :) I wrapped ready-to-bake (a.k.a "whack-the-tube-against-a-counter") dough around a cornucopia I'd shaped out of foil, braided the edges, baked it, then removed the foil. 'Cute for a vegetable tray but would make sweet individual/mini cornucopia rolls too. I'd wanted to try this idea for ages--I'd saved a magazine clipping of the project in my Thanksgiving scrapbook/idea book years ago--and it turned out just as I'd hoped. ♥

Over Homemade Bread and Jelly

At my grandfather's viewing in April of 2001, one of his friends, a garrulous man named Sam I remember as a more self-assured and quicker-to-laugh Jackie Gleason, sat down with me and one of my cousins, the two of us Papa's only granddaughters out of seven grandchildren, and talked about how he had admired our grandfather. Our own generation would have to do a hell of a lot of work to become the kind of people our grandparents were, Sam told us. Papa and those of his generation seemed quite special and just good and strong in some way that later generations did not. The only other thing I specifically remember Papa's friend telling us was how rare and wonderful it was to know someone who, when you unexpectedly stopped by for a quick visit, would welcome you into his home and say, well, first, Papa's usual "Take your hat off and stay awhile," and then, "Here, pull up a chair. Mum just made some of her bread and we still have jelly from this past summer" and how good it was just to sit with Papa in the kitchen and talk over fresh homemade bread and homemade jelly. Sure, some people offer coffee or cake for a guest, Sam went on, but to be able to visit over bread and jelly! That our grandfather had no pretenses about such things and understood how good it was just to catch up with a friend over homemade bread and homemade jelly...! Sam wanted us to understand this. He went on and on about it. It was such a simple thing, he told us, but that was one of the things he would miss the most now that our grandfather had died, and there just weren't people out there like our grandfather anymore.

In one of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, she mentions that her future husband, Almanzo, once asked her, "What kind of man do you think I am?" and Laura admits that she'd never given it any thought. But it is something I've given a lot of thought, and I remember deciding--no, not deciding, just knowing--that day at the funeral home that I would never marry anyone who didn't understand about the bread and jelly.