Monday is Breadmaking Day

Some stories don’t need to be edited, improved, or re-imagined. They just need a place to land.

This one came from my mom.

She wrote it in January like it was nothing. Just casually sat down and captured something that the rest of us have been carrying around in pieces for years. She’s always been a writer, and she has a memory that catches details most people miss.

The woman at the centre of this story is my grandmother, Dorothy. Royal Canadian Air Force. Bowen Island, BC, and from everything I’ve been told, she was an incredible baker.

She passed away shortly after her 50th birthday. I never got to meet her. And somehow, I still feel like I know her through stories like this.

I became a pastry chef. I trained in a four-diamond fine dining room. I’ve made plated desserts with tweezers, squeeze bottles and just enough ego to believe they mattered.

But if I’m being honest, I’ve never even liked the heel of the bread. Seemed it was just a barrier to get to the soft, fluffy middle.

These days, when I bake bread, it’s the first thing someone reaches for. The crust, the edges, the part I used to skip.

This is my mom’s story. I didn’t change a word.

~ Jen

In the summers of my youth, my sister and I witnessed bread making magic. Mondays were the day my mom with her quiet military precision performed the miracle. First she brought out her equipment - a scale to weigh the dough and pans nested in a stack ready for the ritual to unfold. Even though she had made bread 52 times a year for decades, she carefully measured the ingredients to ensure the size of each loaf was right. Mom combined precise amounts of flour, lard, water, vinegar combined with a good measure of yeast required to produce three loaves of the best tasting bread ever. The aroma infused the kitchen with mouth watering anticipation. At three thirty, every Monday afternoon the loaves appeared without fail, with crusts brushed with egg and water wash producing a caramel colour top that had risen inches past each pan’s rim. If we were good, which was always, mom would slice off the heel of a warm fresh loaf, lather it in butter and cut it in half for Peggy and me. Breaking bread never tasted so good.

In the fall, we set out to school on the bus each Monday with the promise that on our return, there would be a treat for our home coming. We did not have to see my mom’s magic to believe it. The best bread ever awaited our return from school.

The rains came in January as they always did on the West Coast. People laughed and said, “At least we don’t have to shovel it,” but the rain brought an abundance of gloomy grey skies and the absence of sunshine. We could shrug off the rain drops with the comforts we enjoyed. January was the month when the budget was tight, so my mother dug through the freezer to produce plums frozen from the summer harvest. We could eat them like popsicles with teeny tiny bites savouring the frozen sweetness. My mom would concoct a plum cobbler baked in the oven emitting the enticing aroma that a dessert of extraordinary delight was ready. On a cold wet evening, the warm plum cobbler tasted like a welcome hug - comforting and entirely sufficient.

With my brother and sister, we experienced my mother’s care vicariously through her delicious baking. Her behavior was more reserved and her comments tended to be succinct. She was not demonstrative with pats on the back or hearty laughter. Yet we knew we were loved.

One Monday, after a gloomy downpour had persisted for nearly a week, Peggy and I returned from school to find the living room gleaming. With nothing more than elbow grease, my mom had polished the black floor tile in the living room to a luster with no electric polisher to assist her. The room was large, 15’ by 30’ with only small area rugs beneath the coffee tables but the floors shone from the paste wax and the air perfumed from the lemon oil applied to the furniture. Her housecleaning was astonishing, but Peggy and I were wet and cold and eagerly anticipating a warm slice of bread. We were disappointed and asked, “Where was our bread?”

My mom tried to explain that the living room needed “doing.” She had worked all day to make it just right but the time had gotten away from her and the bread had been forgotten. Then in an inexplicable moment that’s fixed in my memory, she cried. At first, her tears ran down her cheeks and though she tried to brush them aside, they kept coming until she began to bawl with guttural choking to stifle her sadness.

My mother had enlisted in the Air Force during the war. She was fierce and tough and never out of control. Although her duties were as a book-keeper, if she had been sent into combat with a gun and pointed towards the Germans, we knew she would have fought with honor and valour. Peggy and I had never seen her cry. Yet this Monday, she sobbed as though a dam had broken. Her body convulsed and instinctively, Peggy and I drew to her side, embracing her with all the strength we could muster until her tears began to subside.

Then, in a moment my mom remembered who she was. She rose from the couch and said, “Well, that bread won’t make itself. There is still time girls, so we better get at it.” Together we went to the kitchen to put her magic to the test.

My mother’s love was baked into the ordinary rhythms of our days. Bread was our constant; desserts appeared like small celebrations. She was not one for hugging or kissing - such displays were not her way in the fifties and sixties. Her affection lived in the things she made, the routines she kept, the quiet competence with which she held our world together.