Bread and Love

I'm baking bread today and because I am, I'm thinking about the last baking I did, at my daughter Sarah's house, in that big kitchen with the big wooden counter, that scarred surface that has held the ingredients for meals and bread for over 100 years. History in the wood that, as I mixed and shaped, wafted up to me as images of generations of aproned women, making food for the ones they love, for guests, for the ones who didn't have enough.

The bread was baked and sliced and eaten and in the night, Sarah came to me and read me this poem she had written and is letting me share with you. Because. Thank you, Sarah. I love you!

Getting it right is hard
Understanding family and loving them is
A task
Eating your mother's bread is a different communion
It is your life
Crisp crust or soft
Seeds or fruit
Rye or white
It is her hands
The hands that prized you or
Hated you
Everything you don't know about her
The bread the hands the aching
If you know her you don't
If you don't she is there
Bread is life she is life
You go back to the womb with
Every sandwich every smell
Driving the highway you
Know the fragrance when you pass it
The comfort
The warm intimacy
Of rising dough of yeast
We gather at hearths
We rejoice in the bakery
Because it is home it is life
It is your long lost love
It is your beginning
Fire and blood and yielding
To transformation
I eat the bread my mother made
And I am whole and
Attached to the entire world

Sarah Rebekah Shipley