Essay 2, Part 3 

I did appreciate its sensual aesthetic, though. The smell alone added a special element to the weekend. Even now, when I smell bread baking, I remember lazy Saturday afternoons reading on the living room sofa or walking around the neighborhood, hours tinged with the rhythms and smells of bread-making. Even now, I am awed by the mysterious fermentation process that is the centerpiece of baking this kind of bread: how yeast makes a lump of flour and honey inedible while it’s alive, but edible after it’s been killed by the oven’s heat. How yeast dies for no apparent reason, or simply fails to do its work if it hasn’t been given the proper amount of warmth and sugar—but just enough of both; too much or too little, and your loaf is doomed to remain a flat, unpalatable mess. I must confess that I rarely bake bread for just this reason: I am afraid of yeast.

Yeast is an odd ingredient. Every time I think about the fact that we use a living organism to make our food—encourage it for an hour or two by feeding it, and then kill it off ruthlessly—bothers me a little. I’m not a vegetarian, so I’m not sure why yeast’s fate has always worried me. In any case, yeast’s sacrificial role in the bread-making process reminds me of how bread intersects with my own beliefs. Of course you couldn’t say that yeast is self-sacrificial since there’s not much that a fungal collection of microorganisms can do about its fate in any rational way. But I always shiver a little when I see the yeast dropped into the bowl, the way its grains separate over the surface of the clear liquid and immediately begin to turn it milky, the way these little living creatures are somehow so important to our existence, the way they bloom and then die to make food for us. 

Naturally, in this part of baking I see the familiar Christian imagery expressed in the Lord’s Supper. As yeast becomes immanent in dough to turn it into food and then dies, so Christ became immanent in human life and then died to give eternal life. For this reason I find it ironic that none of the churches I’ve attended have ever used leavened bread in their celebration of the sacrament. To echo the Jewish Passover meal, from which the Lord’s Supper descends, most Western churches use unleavened bread. In my church growing up, the sacramental “bread” was actually shortbread, a concoction of sugar and butter that was quite delicious but almost nothing like the bread we would have eaten the day before at lunch. Since a few people in that church had Celiac’s, the “bread” began to be made without wheat flour, too—which always left me wondering in the back of my mind whether this was really bread, or just a tasty dessert repurposed for the occasion.  

No matter what kind of bread I’m holding at the table, though, the word itself reminds me of the inescapable link to my own beliefs. Curiously, bread’s etymology is irrevocably braided with Christianity. Conventional wisdom would say, “Of course, the Middle Ages were full of medieval Christians,” but it’s actually surprising to me that bread has the pedigree it does, given the pagan antecedents of the Anglo-Saxons. Bread is one of a handful of everyday Anglo-Saxon words that entered modern English directly. And the Old English word bread adopted its modern referent not simply through everyday slippages but, as the OED tracks it, as it was used in English translations of the Bible. Somehow the normal term bread for the substance made from “meal or flour” was inserted into translations of John 6:23 so that, where loaf had been used before, bread predominated. Why? Perhaps because bread seemed more appropriate to the Anglo-Saxon translators than loaf, which refers to the complete, unbroken object, whereas bread originally referred to a fragment of food. As the OED states in its inimitable prose, “It thus appears that a word originally meaning ‘piece, bit, frustum’, has passed through the senses of ‘piece of bread’, ‘broken bread’, into that of ‘bread’ as a substance; while at the same time the original word for ‘bread, loaf, panis’ has been restricted to the undivided article as shaped and baked, the ‘loaf’.”[1] This, too, reverberates with Christian belief. The Savior never remains whole but is always broken: the physical body broken by torture and execution, the emotions broken by abandonment and grief, the soul broken by becoming sin and carrying judgment, as Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:21.

So when I think about bread, I see these two contradictory images: the dough under my mother’s hands, malleable as flesh, and rising in its bowl, a whole, dark, rich mass; and the flat, crumbling, broken pieces in the pastor’s hands at the communion table. To be useful, bread cannot remain loaf; it must be fragmented, scattered, just as yeast in the dough cannot ultimately support human life unless it reproduces exuberantly and dies. In a way, I wonder if my Protestant heritage couldn’t be enriched by the introduction of some Eastern Orthodox bread at the communion table, instead of the shortbread or (worse still, from a culinary perspective) the Saltine-cracker variety that seem to be popular in many Presbyterian churches. The Orthodox church uses leavened bread during the sacrament to represent the risen Savior—the hope of eternal life, the promise of a perfected world. As a believer, I know that the unleavened bread Protestant churches use symbolizes the Passover, and therefore God’s faithfulness to his promises to save his people from death. In that sense, I suppose both traditions manage to use bread as a way to look forward and backward at the same time. For the Orthodox believer, bread looks backward to Christ’s resurrection and forward to his or her own resurrection; for the Catholic or Protestant, the unleavened wafer looks backward to the ancient Passover and forward to the moment of renewal when the age-old promises will finally and completely be kept, and death will be conquered forever.

---

[1] ibid.

Today has been one of those rich, abundant days that seem too good to be true, impossibly varied and wonderful.

For one thing, despite dour predictions to the contrary, the fall colours this year have been gorgeous. After Scott and I ate breakfast this morning, we enjoyed the luxury of sitting by the kitchen windows, reading our books (mine is Britain After Rome), and then we spent the whole morning outside doing yard work. At first I was suspicious of the endeavour, not sure how I could help, but then I remembered that a peculiar clover-like weed has been encamped on our wildflower bed all season. I spent all morning doing my best to pull up its creepers and crawlers, yanking shallow handfuls of leaves out of the soil. They filled the air with a peculiar, bitter smell, mixed with the smell of the heavy, rich, damp earth. I dug up monstrous dandelions, too, and tufts of grass and baby river birch trees. Scott worked nearby, weeding, raking leaves, and trimming back the riotous trumpet vine.

Together we planted several clumps of bulbs: tiny, early crocuses, whose bulbs are no bigger than pennies, and snowdrops, and fat tulips, and enormous daffodils. I always forget how huge daffodil bulbs are compared to other kinds. Scott also tore out the gigantic yucca that has been making its prickly presence felt beside the steps to the deck, and I covered all the freshly-bare dirt with a nice thick layer of leaf mulch so that the large, slow earthworms wouldn't get eaten as they made their way back into the soil.

All this time the breeze shook the last maroon leaves on the dogwood and combed flocks of leaves out of the neighbor's oak tree. The sun evaporated the dew. Neighbours walked past and complimented the roses; the last Pat Austin was just in bloom today. Blanche took a bath in the sunshine and then stalked off about her own business.

When we finally went inside at about one o'clock, we were filthy and smelly, of course. We ate leftover duck for lunch and took turns showering. Then the not-so-glamorous part of the afternoon began. I ensconced myself with my legs up on my desk in the office and a pile of student papers, and started to grade. Grade, grade, grade, all afternoon. I listened to Handel's Messiah and Respighi's Pines of Rome, which eased the pain. Also the clear wind kept blowing through the open windows, and I drank tilleul tea and ate dark chocolate M&Ms. So the hours weren't entirely drudgery. Scott fell asleep on the sofa downstairs.

At about six I finished grading and started to putter around in the kitchen. Scott left for Bible study at half six. I read for class for a bit and then, brain-dead, decided to start cooking. In celebration of this, I created my own new Pandora station, with Andrew Bird as the seed artist--and was rewarded with an evening-long mix of bittersweet, happy-melancholy music, in which Andrew Bird (of course), Sufjan Stevens, Simon & Garfunkel, random French singers, and Jose Gonzalez featured prominently.

First project was baking biscuits. With the Joy of Cooking's help, this took less than ten minutes. Then the arduous work began: steaming artichokes and concocting curry-butternut-squash soup.

Thanks to Tara and Daniel, I had the perfect pot for the soup, a beautiful, brand-new, cast-iron, fall-sky-blue Dutch oven. Unfortunately, my skin reacted nastily to the butternut squash: some chemical in the rind made most of the skin on my left hand peel off over the course of the evening. An unpleasant sensation. While the squash and onions and spices (spices! the best part! madras curry, lots of ginger, cumin, salt, and coriander) were all simmering together, I trimmed the spines off the artichoke leaves and set the two artichokes to steam in another large pot. First time I've ever tried to make artichokes my self. They were always a coveted delicacy when we were kids.

Scott came home at about nine. We ate a long, slow, pleasant meal. I had forgotten how good artichokes are. They are a myth in my head, something I dream about, one of the perfect foods (peaches are also in this category): geometrically superb, aesthetically excellent, many-textured, with that ethereal flavour that always lingers just out of reach. I love the fact that they are fractals incarnate. I love the spines carefully placed at the tip of each petal, the glossy roughness of the petals' outsides, the pale flesh at the bottom of the petals, the furry, silky seeds inside. I love the way they smell and the way they taste, with their own peculiar richness. We ate them with butter and thoroughly enjoyed them.

After tea we read The Practice of Praise, our family worship book right now. While we were praying, Blanche decided to hop up on the living room sofa between us and settle down right under our bowed heads, which was rather distracting, especially since she was purring and waving her tail around. We closed all the windows before we came upstairs: a cold front is forecasted to hit Bloomington tonight, so today was the last day of warm weather for awhile. Spent well.

Essay 2, Part 2 

When I remember my first encounters with bread, my mind leaps immediately to the freshly-baked whole-wheat loaf. Each Saturday afternoon during my childhood, my mother devoted herself to baking bread. She kept the basic mix for her bread—whole wheat flour, a little white bread flour, wheat germ, dry powdered milk—in a mysterious collection of Tupperware containers in a cupboard dedicated to baking supplies. On Saturdays after us kids had settled down to read or dig in the garden, she would pull out the tubs and array them on the countertop. One by one, she would empty them into a mixing bowl and add the wet ingredients: eggs, oil, yeast, of course, and honey. Then they would rise, covered in damp towels, swelling the way a patch of dirt does when a seedling is about to burst through.

When the timer went off, my mother would begin to knead the dough. She would dust the counter with coarse flour and scoop one of the risen loaves out of its bowl. She would sprinkle the loaf with flour, rub her hands with flour, and get to work—pressing, folding, turning, pressing, folding, turning, pressing, folding, turning. When each lump had been kneaded, she would place it in a greased pan, like a baby in a crib. Then all the loaves would sit awhile longer to “proof,” to rise just enough to fill their pans. At last they would go into the oven. Forty-five minutes later, the smell would begin to permeate the house, and then twenty minutes after that, the bread would come out of the oven. Extracting each loaf from its pan took considerable effort: even as a child I understood that if a loaf came out of its pan without tearing or falling apart, this was a major victory. The loaves would cool on racks on the kitchen counter, looking like a row of fat seals sunning themselves.

And so our mainstay was made for the week. My mother usually sliced the loaves after they had cooled, put the bread in tubs, and stored them in the freezer. Oklahoma weather is fickle; some days can be absurdly humid without warning, which makes bread grow mold at an alarming rate if left on the counter.

As a child, I didn’t like my mother’s bread. Culinary heresy! Homemade bread is best, especially if it’s whole-wheat, right? To a child’s taste, the bitter crust and dense texture wasn’t particularly appealing. I don’t think my sensibilities were helped by the fact that my father always ate store-bought bread. (This was more because he is a person of deeply-engrained habits, and since he had eaten peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches on store-bought bread all his life, he wasn’t about to stop doing so when his wife decided to start preparing her own bread for their new family.) Being allowed to eat store-bought bread was a treat, so as a child I never appreciated this weekly tradition for its results.

And now... the second essay. This time the prompt was to write about food and its relationship to our beliefs.

Essay 2, Part 1

Bread: how to write an essay about a food with so much history, so many cultural connotations? Though a family’s “breadwinner” can be male or female today, bread remains the “staff of life” it has been historically—not merely as part of people’s diets, but as a central a central object in Jewish and Christian traditions and in colloquialisms, from “bread and circuses” to “the best thing since sliced bread.” As a word, it has historically meant a vast collection of foods. Tracing bread’s pedigree, even the Oxford English Dictionary seems have encountered a challenge: the etymological entry for this word stretches on for three paragraphs and mentions no fewer than thirteen languages other than modern English. Originally, according to the OED, bread meant “piece, bit, fragment, Latin frustum,” but through a series of permutations it has come to mean “A well-known article of food prepared by moistening, kneading, and baking meal or flour, generally with the addition of yeast or leaven.”[1] “A well-known article of food”? Really? The OED can’t be more descriptive than that?

Initially, I resisted writing about bread as a food that represented something about my beliefs. The very nature of this particular food is to be difficult to handle, literally: the dense, elastic lumps of dough that I used to watch my mother knead always seemed impossibly heavy to me as a child. Somehow, though, she managed to spiral them on the countertop, swirl them, lift them, fold them, punch them down, imprint the heels of her palms on them, so that each loaf had the pattern of her veins and wrinkles stamped on its crust.   

Why not write about something easier? The peach, for example, is pleasantly fuzzy on the outside, golden and juicy on the inside, and has a long, fascinating, conflicted history of travel from China to Persia to Europe to the Americas. It grows well in Oklahoma’s hot climate and sandy soil. With its welcome explosion of sweet flavor, it somehow makes the waterlessness of that part of the country bearable. Bread is not nearly as glamorous. Whereas the peach weighs and tastes like the fruit of the gods, an object that Zeus might lust after or Apollo could adopt as his emblem, bread is simple, quotidian. Of course, I could romanticize it. I could eulogize the warm grittiness of the smell of freshly-baked bread—how it smells the way a well-played cello sounds. Or I could write about its weight. A good loaf of wheat bread is as heavy as a shovelful of compost, as dense as a fugue by Bach, and as life-giving.

As I thought about writing this essay, though, I kept coming back to the fact that bread does represent something real about my beliefs. Its necessity in my everyday life, its variety, the method of producing it, my personal experiences with it, and its role in Christian theology and practice all make it a carrier of meaning for me. To steer away from romanticism, perhaps the first place to start thinking about my personal relationship with bread is somewhere between the ideal and the real. My childhood memories of the role bread played in my family are both flavoured with halcyon peace and rooted in solid reality, a reality that reflects some of the beliefs that have shaped my adult life.  

---

[1] “Bread.” Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 2012. Web. 13 September 2012. 

For your Friday reading pleasure, here is a poem by Christian Wiman, from his latest book, Every Riven Thing (2010). This is the title poem, in case you couldn't infer that.

Every riven thing

God goes, belonging to every riven thing he’s made

sing his being simply by being

the thing it is:

stone and tree and sky,

man who sees and sings and wonders why

God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he’s made,

means a storm of peace.

Think of the atoms inside the stone.

Think of the man who sits alone

trying to will himself into a stillness where

God goes belonging. To every riven thing he’s made

there is given one  shade

shaped exactly to the thing itself:

under the tree a darker tree;

under the man the only man to see

God goes belonging to every riven thing. He’s made

the things that bring him near,

made the mind that makes him go.

A part of what man knows,

apart from what man knows,

God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made.

A cat is sitting on my lap! She decided that my left arm looked like a good spot to rest her stomach, so I have been draped upon thoroughly, which makes typing challenging, as you might imagine. With a calico, whiskered, purring creature beaming up into your face, though you would find it difficult to change the status quo, too.

I went running this morning. Snippy enough for leggings now, and drifts of leaves underfoot. I spent the morning trying to write a poem with minor success and walked to campus to teach. Another one of these spectacular days, in which every colour seems to have its own life, to be somersaulting and gyrating everywhere, from sky and trees and big patches of chrysanthemums.

First class went ok today; they were engaged, at least, and willing to participate. Second class was its usual self, disenchanted and sleepy. Afterward I walked home in time to meet Mary and Scott. Mary was coming over for a grading party; Scott was coming home from working at the AHR. Of course, before we could actually start grading, Scott had to show us the ridiculous laser disco light projector Thomas brought over for our dance parties, and then he had to introduce Mary to the wonders of L.A. Noire, his latest computer game.

We did get some grading done, though. I made Chinese beef-and-noodles for the three of us for tea. Mary left for CY at seven, and a little later, Scott and I walked down to Auer Hall for a chamber orchestra concert. As it turns out, one of my students is in the chamber orchestra. The concert was quite good, despite including a long piece by Benjamin Britten. As usual, the second half of the program was entirely occupied by a symphony, this time Mozart's "Jupiter." I'm convinced that symphony simply exists for the last movement, which conjures up the whole world of royalty, order, and Enlightenment--all with an unquenchable exuberance.

Scott and I walked home, shivering. He's working on a legal project right now, and Aria has drifted over to try to occupy his armchair, too. I've been reading everyone else's blogs. The way our lives have all shot off and branched apart amazes me. Watching people become themselves amazes me. God works in curious ways.

Essay 1, Part 3

Now, the return of large predators might take care of the urban deer problem, but it would pose its own issues for Bloomington. The more I think about the situation, the more puzzled I become. Since I am a Christian, I consider the issue from the perspective that humans are stewards of nature, neither its exploitative, ruthless overlords nor its abashed, self-effacing victims. What is the proper place for an urban deer herd from this standpoint? Are humans invaders on deer territory who need to leave? Or are deer invaders on human territory, which should be culled to provide safety for drivers on city streets? Under the guise of stewardship, either one of these approaches could theoretically be defended. Like most people who enjoy gardening as a pastime, I have a soft heart and hate to see animals killed, but I also hate to watch deer who have skin diseases, maimed limbs, and tumors living a pitiful existence because humans cannot relieve their suffering—and because there are no predators to give them a more natural death.

At this point I must confess that Pollan’s argument seems appealing. Humans are part of nature and, practically, we cannot now ignore the fact that we have made an impact on the land. We should learn to live with the consequences of that impact responsibly, to tend the land wisely. In broad terms this all sounds very noble, but when it comes to sharpshooters with silencers lying in wait on quiet neighborhood streets to shoot the deer, this sweeping rhetoric seems a little less romantic.

The diversity of opinions on the question raises further complications. I can only voice my own ideas. On one level this lets me gaze down upon the garden peacefully from my second-storey window, write this essay, and go happily on my way, knowing that a much-more informed task force will advise the city council to take this or that action, and that the city council will follow a more-or-less democratic process to decide whether to follow through or not. On another level, my husband finds the whole situation frustrating. When will action be taken? When it is taken, will it be sufficient? Not to mention the rest of the community, which proudly vocalizes its opinions at every opportunity, and which will probably create a ruckus over any action that is taken, no matter what that is.

To make this more personal, I wander outside and look at the roses again. Are we to deny our urban cohabitors their snack, or do we keep the deer from eating the roses in the name of good gardening? Of course, roses are equipped with thorns to prevent just this problem, theoretically. Braithwaite’s thorns rival those of wild roses: they coat its canes with a forbidding mesh of half-inch, needle-thin, razor-sharp spikes. Even meek Pat Austin, which has been bred for its colour, not its durability (its flowers begin to droop halfway through a mild summer day), has its share of sturdy protective gear. None of this has stopped the deer, though. Long before we planned the rose bed, we talked about installing a low wall, a classy combination of brick and wrought iron, around the property, not to block the view of the garden but to protect the plants from passing dogs and cars, and to add to the house’s English cottage appeal. That solution, however, requires money, more money than a pair of graduate students can scrape together at this point. An eight-foot fence is the suggested protection for gardens on the task force’s website. But the roses were originally planted partly to enhance the neighbourhood’s beauty, and an eight-foot wall of steel mesh sounds more like prison strictures than storybook loveliness.

The easiest short-term solution to the problem has been deer repellant, a combination of garlic, animal urine, and hot pepper extract sprayed onto the plants to make them taste unpleasant. Back in May, Scott sprayed the roses with the mixture, hopeful that this would prevent further predations. As soon as the next rain descended, though, the repellant washed away, and the deer, hungry for tender young shoots at the beginning of the growing season, started to snack. Clearly the roses had been planted for their benefit, right next to a quiet road, right at eye level. The repellant had only given the roses enough time to grow sweet new shoots and buds. After we grieved, we sprayed—and have repeated the process in the months that followed. Scott, who is a vocal advocate of gun control, threatens darkly that if he had a gun, he would shoot the deer himself. One of our friends has joked that we ought to position an animatronic dragon with glowing eyes on our property for the dual purpose of scaring away deer and undergraduates.

As I smell the powerful tea-and-citrus scent of the Evelyns, though, I continue to wonder what good stewardship looks like. This morning these two bushes are weighted with enormous pale pink blossoms, so huge and multifoliate that passers-by often mistake them for peonies. Oddly enough, every time the deer have snacked on the Evelyns, they have responded by only growing taller and putting out greater abundances of flowers. I surmise (quietly) that the deer have actually helped prune the roses this season, inducing them to leaf more fully and flower more frequently. It is a balance, of course—to protect those new shoots, the roses have to be sprayed—but I am consistently surprised by how quickly and enthusiastically the roses rebound after a deer-feast. 

 So for now, deer repellant seems to work. It provides an organic solution to a natural problem without killing deer or plants. Of course, it is a solution that only works for the garden, not the city streets, and it requires extra work. But isn’t that what gardening is? The process of learning to shepherd nature without squelching it or quailing before it? The process of enjoying nature’s beauty and appreciating its bounty, while protecting its inherent wildness? A process that requires continual work, a discerning eye, and dedicated hands? But now I find myself veering toward the idealistic again. I glance across the garden to the larger flower bed at the corner and remember that now the question becomes what to do about the rabbits that have been beheading our sunflowers