The email arrived this morning. The subject line read, “Bread.” The message read:
“My 11-year-old granddaughter, Bella, makes bread and wonders if you will eat some if she makes it for you?
“We are not sick with COVID or anything like that. Bella’s mom died from breast cancer and Bella has started baking lately because her mother once enjoyed baking. She really wants you to try her bread.”
Well, let me start by saying that I am flattered, Bella. As it happens, I have a long history with bread. In fact, when I was a kid, I was built like a miniature loaf of bread.
Let me explain. When I was around your age I was a chubby redhead. My chubbiness was partly because, after my father passed, to cope with our new grief my mother started baking bread every day.
Looking back, I don’t really know why she was making bread so often. Perhaps because it was cheap. Or maybe because she had a lot of pent-up energy she needed to get
out.
Then again, maybe she was baking bread because she was simply trying to fatten me up. Which is possible. My mother believed redheaded boys were much cuter when they were chunky.
And I know this because whenever she would pinch my soft white belly, she would say, “That’s Mama’s handsome, chubby wubby wittle wedhead.”
For years, I believed that being a chubby wubby wittle wedhead was a good thing.
So I ate a lot of sourdough, French, whole wheat, rye, cinnamon raisin, and white bread each morning. Almost daily my mother would leave these hot loaves sitting out, cooling, and everyone would pause to admire them like works of sculpture.
This was powerful bread. It could beckon you from across the house. And when you saw it sitting in the windowsill, steaming in the early sunlight, you would gravitate toward it like a mosquito to a…