Day 22: The Bread Oven

"Love bade me welcome," George Herbert wrote at the start of a poem, and at the end of it the shy guest finally gives in: "So I did sit and eat."

I read it twice this evening, with flour still under my nails.

Dear Grandmother,

Today Dora fired the old bread oven in the school yard. It is the brick dome by the woodshed, the one the children call the beehive, and nobody had baked in it since the summer. Dora says an oven that sits cold for too long forgets what it is for, like a person who stops cooking for anyone but herself. So this morning, before the first bell, she was already out there with an armful of birch and a face like a general.

You must know this oven. It was old in your year too. I have been trying to picture you standing where I stood, with your sleeves rolled, your hair tied back, feeding the fire and pretending not to be cold.

The fire burns inside the oven itself for two hours. Then Dora rakes out the coals with a long iron hoe, sweeps the floor with a wet broom, and the bricks hold the heat. Leon asked how she knows when it is ready, and she did what Emil's mother did with her kitchen oven: she threw a handful of flour on the oven floor. "Count," she said. We counted. At eight the flour turned brown. "Ready," said Dora, and reached for the first loaf.

The children each shaped a small loaf. Ida made hers into a hedgehog with scissors. Sami made a perfect round one and would not let anyone touch it. Yuri made something he said was the ferry, though it came out of the oven looking more like a shoe. Every loaf had a little paper flag with a name on it, and every flag was scorched at the edges, and nobody minded.

Here is the thing Dora taught me that I want to keep. When you think the dough has risen enough, press it gently with one floured finger, about as deep as your first knuckle. If the hollow springs back at once, it needs more time. If it stays and does not move, it has gone too far. If it fills back slowly, halfway and then a little more, it is ready. I tried it on six loaves and got it right on four. Anyone with a bowl of dough on the kitchen table can try it tonight.

Dora's dough was made with her starter, the grey, sour-smelling paste she keeps in a stone jar in the school kitchen. She told me it is older than she is. Her mother fed it, and her mother's mother before that. When Dora's son left home, she gave him a spoonful in a jam jar, wrapped in a tea towel, and he still bakes with it in his own kitchen. Families pass starters on like that in many places. A spoonful of old dough holds the yeasts and the sour bacteria of one house, and if you feed it flour and water every day, it lives. Some starters are said to be more than a hundred years old. Nobody can prove the age, of course. But when Dora lifts the lid, she smells her mother's kitchen, and that is proof enough for her.

I wonder whose starter you used. I wonder if it is still alive somewhere in this town, in somebody's jar, without anyone knowing it once rose for you.

At lunch we ate the bread hot, with butter and the barley soup, sitting on the benches with our coats on. Leon burned his tongue and said it was worth it. Dora sat with us for once, instead of standing at the hatch. She tore her own bread with both hands, the way you do when you made it, and she looked happy in a way I had not seen.

On the way home I took a loaf to the ferry house and left it on Emil's step, wrapped in a cloth. I did not knock. It was a quarter to six. As I reached the corner, the bell began.

George Herbert's guest drew back at first. Love had to ask him more than once. I think the oven is like that, and people too. They need a long fire before they are ready to feed anyone. Then you take the coals out, and the warmth stays in the bricks for hours, and everyone sits, and everyone eats.

Vera

Day 23: The Unposted Letter

"More than kisses, letters mingle souls," John Donne wrote to a friend, in a letter that was itself a poem.

He meant letters that arrive. I have been thinking all evening about the ones that do not.

Dear Grandmother,

I went to the ferry house after school to fetch my cloth back. Emil had washed it and folded it in four, and it was waiting on the table beside two cups, as if he had known what time I would come. He has a way of setting a table that reminds me of you: the cups turned so the handles face the same way, the spoons laid on a saucer, never on the cloth.

We talked about the bread first. He said the crust was right, and that the oven must have been hot enough, and that Dora's mother used to make the same loaf. Then the kettle boiled, and he poured, and he said, without looking at me, "I wrote to her once."

I did not say anything. I have learned that from him. If you wait, he goes on.

"When she left," he said. "The night after the bus went. I sat at this table and wrote her a letter. I took it to the post office the next morning, and I stood outside, and then I took it home again."

I asked him why. He turned his cup a little on the saucer. He said that she had chosen, and that a letter would only have made her choose again, and that he did not want to be the reason for a hard week in her life. He said he was twenty-four and thought he was being noble. "Now I think I was only frightened," he said. "Both things can be true."

He did not offer to show it to me, and I did not ask. He said only that it is still in the house, in a drawer, and that the stamp on it is so old it would not pay for a postcard today. Then he laughed, which surprised us both, and we drank our tea.

Grandmother, I sat there with my own letters in my head. Twenty-three of them now, in your blue tin on my kitchen shelf. I have not told Emil about them. But I understood something at his table that I had not understood before. A letter you do not send is still a letter. It still took an evening. It still needed the right words, and you still crossed some out. It is only that the journey is shorter, from the hand to the drawer.

On the way home I thought about his saucers. Long ago, tea was often drunk from the saucer itself. Cups had no handles then, and saucers were deep, and people poured a little hot tea out of the cup into the saucer to cool, and drank from that, and nobody thought it rude. Later, when cups grew handles and manners changed, the saucer became a small plate for catching drips and resting a spoon, so that the spoon would not stain the cloth. Emil uses his in that careful way, as a place for the spoon and nothing else. I think his mother taught him, at the same table.

Here is something I tried tonight, and you could try it, and so could anyone reading over my shoulder. Write the letter you are afraid to send. Write all of it, with the date at the top. Then put it in an envelope, seal it, and write on the outside the date one week from now. Do not open it before then. When the day comes, read it again. Sometimes you will post it. Sometimes you will keep it. Either way, you will know what you meant, and that is half the work of any letter.

Mine have no date on the outside. They are not waiting for a week. They are waiting for nothing, and I think that is all right too.

When I left, Emil walked me to the gate. The lake was the colour of pewter, and the reeds were stiff with cold. Just before six he walked out to the end of the jetty, and the bell rang out over the water, as it does every evening. I stood and listened until the last one stopped.

John Donne was right that letters mingle souls. But I think he would forgive me for adding this. They mingle even in a drawer. They mingle in a tin. Emil's letter has been mixing with his life for fifty-eight years, the way salt goes into a stock and you cannot take it out again. You never read it. It changed him anyway.

Your Vera