I've learned this week that pigs make literal pig piles. When not rooting through the grass or galloping in circles, the pigs we've borrowed from E are most often snuggled up side by side or one on top of the other for a nap.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

It’s overcast now, but for a few minutes this morning the bay was sunlit. The water, the cobbles under our feet, the green-gray mass of the islands, the purple martin nestboxes—empty still—all sharply defined. We stood looking out over the bright water till the clouds closed in and the sun sparkle disappeared, then turned away and climbed back up the bluff, walking home through ordinary winter-soft light.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

Riding the straight shoulder of Chuckanut after dark, cars screaming by too bright too loud too fast, ducks rustling up from the flooded fields with my passing, and a barn owl glides towards the road. For a hopeless moment I think she’s going to cross and be struck but she lands at the edge of the ditch and turns her pale, flat face into the glare of my headlight.

We look at each other.

She lifts off as silently as she landed. I ride on towards the farm.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

We have so many backyard schemes to plant this first winter and spring in the new house: a kitchen garden, a fruit and nut orchard, a native wetland meadow and hedge along the flooding drainage ditch at the bottom of the garden. Big dreams to fill the bakery’s slow season. But before planting there are noxious weeds to dig out (again), fruit trees to take down and buck up (why did someone 1. plant trees with mild and uninspiring fruit along 2. the entire south property line and 3. pollard them once and then never prune them again?), old privacy fences (patched and propped and patched again) to mend or burn, drainage ditches to dig, a deer fence to build. I spent yesterday afternoon mucking through the future orchard, thinking about fruit trees and digging in drainage. The ground squished. The mud clumped on the soles and sides of my boots. The sod was heavy, the clay underneath even heavier. Worried I’d snap the shovel’s loose handle, I lifted the wedges of wet earth out with my hands. My gloves soaked through, and my cracked old boots. By the time E showed up with a chainsaw and began cutting trunk-sized water spouts off a cherry tree it was getting dark and the first ditch was nearly done. It was all great fun: the mud, the hard, wet work, the flicker of slash fires, and the crack of falling limbs. More akin to building waterworks from rock, sand, and kelp tubes—a favorite game on family backpacking trips to the coast when I was young—than to grownup labor. This morning I found the first ditch filling but not yet flowing. I itched to grab a shovel and correct the grade but, still in pajamas and with a half finished mug of coffee in hand, resisted. Tomorrow I’ll answer your emails (sorry!), pay quarterly taxes, research equipment. Today I’m putting on yesterdays clothes (hopefully dry) and going back out to play in the mud.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

East of the mountains, sunshine and hard snow. For days the valley was dark with fog. Skiing along I could see the track in front of me disappearing into gray, the hummocked snow on either side fading out. The trees, the houses, the raven overhead were all shadows in the fog. Now in the sunshine, color. I ditched the ridged ice of the skate platform and double poled down the groomed tracks, looking up and around at the orange ponderosa, the white birch, the red twig dogwood, the electric green lichen dripping from the firs, the brown alder catkins. Textures stood out in sharp focus: the crinkle of dead leaves, the deep grooves in the cottonwood bark, the scarred-over scratch of bear claws down a birch trunk. Below the clear water of the creeks the cobbles were deep yellow, green, brown, their colors undulled by algae. And above the sky: blue and blue and blue.

Tomorrow we return west and I head back into the kitchen. There will be bread next week. If you haven’t already, you can sign up for the Winter Bread Subscription or order single loaves through the online store. This coming Wednesday I’ll be baking Tinned Wheat, Mountain Rye, Cinnamon Raisin (the Wednesday Special), Vollkornbrot, and Seedy Buckwheat. The last two I’ll bake only on the 4th Wednesdays of the month till the market resumes in April.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

After the mad rush of the holiday markets, I shut down the bakery every year for a break. This year the first two weeks were consumed by holiday gatherings and house projects. I thought of bread no further than finishing up the bakery’s bookkeeping and throwing together a few casual loaves to fuel our work. By the third week, away from the house and its demands, my days opened. I began to walk, run, ski for hours. My mind woke up, filling the space now empty of work and chores. Often I was so full of jostling thoughts I barely registered the landscape around me. I’d come in from the cold with ideas fully formed and go straight to my notebook or computer to record them, spending the short afternoons and late into the nights absorbed in putting some new scheme to paper. I made a lot of rudimentary but very satisfying diagrams, floor plans, and maps.

Approaching my last week of break I find my mind finally quieting, the backlog of creativity released. Instead of grabbing my laptop and disappearing into its depths until my eyes are scratchy with sleep, I might now come in from a walk and meander to the kitchen to check the sourdough and put on a pot of tea. I might pick up the newspaper. I might feel the sudden itch to bake. I’ve been feeling a lot of baking itches. Pretty soon I’m going to run out of people to eat them all. By the time I return to Bellingham in a week to start up the Winter Bread Subscription, I’ll be more than ready to get back into the bakery, which makes this a winter break well spent.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

When I was a child I built forts. I built forts with curtains and couch pillows, with driftwood, within the branches of my favorite climbing trees. I tunneled into deep snow and nested under bushes. Sometimes the forts were only sketches: this stump is the table; that red cedar the wall; the front door is here, between two stones; those bits of sea glass, smooth beach rocks veined with pink and green, feathers, and drying seed pods lined up along the log are my treasures. Other times the forts were solid, like the one I built in the woods behind my mormor’s house with cedar branches, sheets of moss, and the upended roots of a toppled fir. A few years ago I went walking through those woods and found the lean-to’s remains. Its roof was collapsed and mossy, the stones marking its door unmoved.

Over the years of searching for a bakery space I’ve found many nonstarters—spaces too small, too inaccessible, too contaminated, too expensive—and a few possibilities. For each possibility I sketch out floor plans. As a child I walked and climbed and crawled through my creations. Now I trace my way across the screen from sink to mixer, mixer to table, table to rack, rack to oven. Drawing a floor plan, it turns out, feels a lot like building a fort: you make an abstract representation of a space, whether from rocks and branches or lines on a page, and fill in the details with your imagination.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

When the snow came our lives turned inward. Even if I’d trusted the car drivers, the unploughed roads were too rough for my bicycle. The sidewalks were mostly un-shovelled and slow going. We were stuck. Clearing out the common rooms in our house felt like unraveling the homemaking of the past months. We stacked chairs, couch, chest, table together, emptied the bookshelf and cabinets and unscrewed them from the walls. The plants now crowded the dark, upstairs hallway. Books piled up under my bed and marched up the stair treads. Rolled carpets and table leaves leaned together in a closet.

The work was long and often tedious. Drywall, mudding, mudding, mudding, cutting trim to fit the crooked walls, blocking up the odd gaps, caulking and caulking and painting and painting. Every morning I pulled on the same faded black t-shirt with holes in the armpits, the same canvas pants with a utility knife and pencil in the side pocket. I lost track of the days.

Today is the first of the new year. The house is still in chaos but a dank, cold wind no longer blows up through the gaps in the walls. There’s color now where there was once only contractor gray and peeling wallpaper. This isn't the decisive new beginning that a house restored to order would be but the yellow walls are a good start.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

I watched the trees outside the window bend and sway as I stuffed my pannier with extra layers and water for the ride to the farm. It was my last delivery of the year. The wind had been blowing hard from the southeast all day. Just that morning the headwind had turned my southbound delivery route around the bay from an easy, flat ride into what felt like a five mile hill climb. Still, what was the point of an e-assist bicycle if not to assist with adverse conditions like these? I strapped the box of bread to the front deck, hung my pannier on the back rack, and rode out in defiance of the wind

I rode through the city under fast, gray skies, through the forest with the treetops swaying and the breeze gentle around me. I wound the tight curves south of Larabee, bedrock rising to my left and falling away to my right, the sun breaking clear above the islands and glazing the water below shining white. I rode past water falling white and fast into culverts, past the mud streaks of small landslides, past rockfalls, past a giant cedar snag nose down beside the road, a long skid like a sled run streaking the hillside above it. The bare branches of the maples stood out bright against the firs. Madronas blazed up from the rock, red and yellow and shining green.

Out from the protection of the hills the Skagit flats were as bad as I’d imagined. The wind picked up as the sun set, head on and getting colder. I distracted myself with birds. Red tail, red tail, starlings, red tail. Sea gulls floated in the flooded fields. A heron lifted off from just beside the road, awkward and startlingly large. Somewhere to my right I could hear geese—dozens? hundreds?—calling as they settled for the night. I was so tired I was blinking in and out of sleep even as my legs kept pumping. Five miles to go, and then two. I stopped to pull on another layer, heavier gloves, to drink water hoping it would wash the sleep from my eyes. Every mile was slower than the one before. I crossed the Samish and turned east. The wind punched me in the side and sent me wavering. I stared straight ahead at the road, at the dark clouds massed over the foothills. Pushed and pushed and I was at the farm. I abandoned the bike in the middle of the farm road and went straight inside. What was usually a ninety minute ride, motorless, had taken me nearly two and a half hours with the electric assist. E was gone on deliveries. I didn't care. I tore off a hunk of bread and spread it thick with butter. Ate it and I tore another, and two more after that. I finished the dried apricots in the tin above the sink. I boiled water and filled a mug, wrapped myself in a quilt, and drank it slowly. I was cold and exhausted and so grateful for walls and slippers, for the mug warming my hands, for stillness.

It was a good ride. Hard and good. I was glad for the ride and glad it was over, or I was glad for the year of baking and glad it was over, or I was just glad to be sitting down, warming up with the hot water and food. I was glad. And then I was asleep.

Happy winter.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

Thursday evening I turn down the oven on the rye bread, trade apron for sweater, and roll my bike out of the kitchen. Outside, the low sun sets the buildings and the bare branches of trees aglow. A maple burns red as an ember against the dark purple rain clouds. It’s sky drama worthy of a Renaissance painting.

Not far from the kitchen is the last remnant of a 19th century orchard inside a 1970’s development. The development—aptly or ironically?— is named Orchard Terrace. There are only a handful of trees left now between the low brick condos. Most no longer bear fruit. My apple’s trunk is hollow and open on one side. Moss, ferns, and horny lichen grow from the old bark. Last year the groundskeeper threatened to cut the tree down, but in the end cut off only one of the two main branches. The remaining branch is heavy with fruit.

The apples are russetted green-gold. They ripen late, bake well, and keep for months. When I walked over a week ago the fruit still clung firmly to the tree, flesh tart and juicy. Now it falls at a touch. When I bite into an apple I find it dry and sweet.

I walk to the nearest condo and tap on the screen. The door is open. Inside, a woman is sitting in a lounge chair watching TV. She turns to me without surprise. “I’ve been waiting for you,” she says. “Would you like the ladder?"

Sophie
Owner | Baker