duhpursuit

I’ve been making bread, reminding myself of release, patience, the importance of yielding to each other, to life as it rises beneath our fists. Even the dough must exhale a little in order to make things turn out right. It’s all a matter of balance.

More or less.

It’s intuitive, all the books say. You’ve got to learn to listen, to read with your hands the changes, the messages that are right there on your fingertips. The bread will tell you what to do if you’re careful, attentive.

A poem by Robert Louis Stephenson

Fairy Bread

Come up here, O dusty feet!
Here is fairy bread to eat.
Here in my retiring room,
Children, you may dine
On the golden smell of broom
And the shade of pine;
And when you have eaten well,
Fairy stories hear and tell.

It’s beautiful here. One of those afternoons when summer is making it’s way into something else, and the rain is dotting the pavement. You can open the windows and let down all your airs, lean into the bread and listen to the crickets, plan soups in your mind and think of autumn–the harvest already at work in your heart.

I have a beautiful life.

The garden in the back, tomatoes filling the spaces between basil and okra, the spiders and hummingbirds keeping things in balance. The compost pile in the corner of the yard has two avocado trees growing as hard as they can before the frost, still just a promise from October. There are raspberries now, after two years of tenderness and waiting, another handful every few days.

Waking up at 8 o’clock with motivation and nothing that has to be done. The floors are swept. The counters smoothed and sprayed down. Eggs and coffee sizzling in their pots and pans. Tip-toe-shuffle back to bed to smell your hair and nestle my face into your neck.

The children, skipping through the halls, smiling, saying they can’t wait for sixth-period when they will see me, opening their ruddy palms for a tootsie roll and smiling, smiling, smiling despite all they have been through, despite all they will have to face without a father, without a mother, without their best friend, a dog named Billy or Goldie or something else they will never forget.

The friends who offer unexpected gifts–jokes in my inbox, a slice of zuchini bread, a text message just because, the updates to their blogs–like honey, like mollasses, slow and sweet, holding things together.

Bread, smooth and fragrant, yielding beneath my fists, rising slowly, teaching me, again, about patience, about the way of things–each of us needs time to rise before we can yield. All this possibility, this beautiful, devastating, hope.