The grace of good bread

My partner makes bread. The habit went dormant for a while, but it’s back. Though it’s upped by daily consumption of carbs, there is something of grace in good bread made at home. It comforts, sustains and nourishes in a particular way.

The Canadian-American writer Monica Shannon (1905-1965) was raised on a cattle ranch in Montana. Though she moved away to Los Angeles, California, as an adult, Shannon never lost the art of bread-making or her sense of its grace.

When we eat the good bread,
we are eating months of sunlight,
weeks of rain and snow from the sky,
richness out of the earth.
We should be great, each of us radiant,
full of music and full of stories.
Able to run the way the clouds do,
able to dance like the snow and the rain.
But nobody takes time to think that he eats
all these things, and that sun, rain,
snow are all a part of himself.