Fresh Bread

Fresh Bread—27 April 2010

Fresh bread just out of the oven, it was one of my mother’s later discoveries. She bought the dough already shaped and frozen into pre-risen loaves, let them thaw, rise and then bake them. It was white bread with no redeeming nutritional value and yet, hot out of the oven, its scent exploding through the house like an ancient siren, it didn’t matter. Late afternoon the smell of it pulls me into the kitchen like a gravitational force. The kitchen in my parents’ home is a huge square with dark brown cabinets on two sides of the room. The refrigerator on the north side of the room is next to the hallway that leads to the garage. The sink is in the corner and on the east side of the room; the cabinets are split by a narrow window that looks out onto Mother’s garden. The south side of the room consists of Mother’s desk, flanked on either side with more cabinets for her files and a window over the desk that looks down the hill to the lake. The door to the screened in porch is on that wall. On the west wall, the wall that has the swinging door to the rest of the house is a stone fireplace and a bar with lighted shelves above where glasses shine. Two chairs sit in front of the fireplace. In the center of the room is an island with the stove in the center surrounded by Italian tile, white background, green vines and orange flowers with matching green tile trim on the edges. The two ovens are below the stove. There is a sofa on the backside of the island facing Mother’s desk. This is the room my parents lived in. In the winter, there is a constant fire in the fireplace with frequent trips through the garage to the woodpile stacked high. Mother is usually at her desk though sometimes she sits on the floor, legs spread, playing solitaire. Dad sits either on the sofa or a chair or sometimes at the small card table next to the island with the mail spread out before him.

The smell of fresh bread circles. Mother, who used to be so strict about eating in between meals puts the bread on cooling racks and then watches the vultures circle, as she says. She makes a brief complaint, “if you cut it before it’s cooled, it’ll smoosh down.” I agree heartily, get the sharpest bread knife and proceed to carefully slice two pieces, with minor smooshing. Then I add the butter to melt easily on the still warm bread and last, either local honey or homemade strawberry jam. It is a tough choice.

Dad waits until I’ve cut the first slice and then says, “I’ll have some of that too, Miggs,” as if he’s just noticed what is going on, wasn’t in support of cutting too warm bread but since it has already happened. . . It was a delicious moment, that quiet camaraderie. Mother superiorly saying she wouldn’t have any because she didn’t want to get fat and Dad and I smiling, and saying nothing, eating and nodding, licking our sticky fingers, she being the only fat person in the room. Then, of course, we needed something to drink, some juice for me, a soda for Dad. And he would smile again that sweet smile when I set his glass in front of him before he returned to his reading. Mother would resume her current project, working at her desk or planning her spring garden or looking through the 101 catalogues that came daily, it seemed. She bought everything she could from a catalogue so she wouldn’t have to make a trip to town. And I would settle into the unclaimed chair, pick up a magazine I hadn’t yet read or just watch the fire, poke it a bit, fetch some more wood and smell that smell as I came back in from the cold outside, that sweet fresh bread smell mixed with the slight scent of smoke. It was my home. I could not imagine that it would ever change.