The Loaf Report

December twenty-first. I have flour in a place I cannot explain, and there is a lopsided round of bread sitting on my kitchen counter that I made with my own two hands, and I keep going to look at it the way you check on something you don't quite believe is real.

The community center winter brochure has been on my kitchen table since the first week of December. I'd been flipping past the usual pages, the Wednesday yoga I already attend, the pottery open studio slots I know by heart, and then I hit the Saturday cooking classes and stopped on one: Beginner Bread, four hours, no experience necessary. That last part was doing a lot of heavy lifting for me. I signed up on a Thursday evening, the same four-minute-decision energy that got me into the letterpress workshop and the outdoor skills session, and I did not think very hard about what four hours of bread-making actually involved.

The answer is: a surprising amount of arm. The instructor, a small patient woman who I suspect has seen every possible thing go wrong with dough, walked us through the process with the calm of someone who has made peace with beginners. My dough was too wet, then too stiff, then somehow both at once. At a certain point I just committed to it and pressed on, which is not a technique but is apparently a personality trait. The woman at the workstation next to me had done this before and her dough looked like a photograph of dough. Mine looked like a decision.

The dough is winning.

But here is the thing: it came out. Not beautifully. Not photographably, except that I photographed it anyway because the point is that it exists. I carried it home on the bus in a paper bag with the flour still on my forearms, and I put it on the counter next to Gerald's pot, and I thought: this is the same feeling as the first time I made it up the low wall without assistance. The body did something unfamiliar and then it was done and the thing was real. The loaf is a little dense and pulling from the left, but it's bread, and I made it, and the brochure was right.

She is lopsided. She is mine.