When the mixing and shaping are done for the day, when the bread is rising, and the cookies and scones are lined up in orderly rows up and down the sheet pans, then the real work is finished. Still, hours remain. Still there is the baking, the oven loaded and unloaded and loaded again, the proofing baskets to scrub, dishes to wash, cooled loaves to stack in their stacks of boxes, walls to wipe down, the floor to sweep and mop. It is late morning on a day that started well before sunrise, and the work is not even half done.

So I make a cup of coffee, milky and strong, and sit out back where I can see the alley and a ribbon of sky through the window. I open the library’s collection of digital books on my phone, and go in search of someone to read me a story. It has to be the right story. A real sweep-you-up, fast-paced, wild rumpus of a story. A story to lift me off my aching feet, above my stiff knees, away from the sweat and flour grit and my tired-sticky eyes. A story to carry me through the late morning, over the afternoon, and deep into the evening.

It is a wonderful and disconcerting thing, to lose myself so completely in a book. When I am reading, or being read to, I no longer hear the world clattering around me or notice the passing of time. It has always been this way. Theoretically, I believe in being fully attentive to my work. After all, I spend most of my days working. If I don’t pay attention to the working hours, I could lose the greater part of my adult life. But in practice, my baking days are too long, the kitchen too loud and poorly lit. My body tolerates more than my mind, so I let the stories carry my mind away while my body moves steadily on through the familiar motions.
​
It is the bike ride home that brings me back. After hours of living divided, the steady pump of tired legs, the air moving over my skin, the smells of the night, hook my mind and pull it inside my body. Afterward, if I have the energy and the light, I’ll run down to the water. Standing on the broken willow at the path’s edge, looking out at the ocean and sky through its branches, I’ll listen to the waves wash their steady beat against the shore. Each wave is like a breath. Each breath pulls me farther inside my skin, till my mind stills, and I am whole again.

TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White + The Whole Garden
Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot
Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Cookies
Oatmeal Marmalade Scone
Strawberry Buckwheat Scone
Sweet & Sour Cherry Galette
Sour Cherry & Hazelnut Tart
Shortbread

WEDNESDAY MARKET
Red & White
Country Rye
Mountain Rye
Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Cookies
Scone, Shortbread, etc.

​See you soon.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

By chance and the circumstance of my interests, I’ve read a pile of books and articles recently on the costs of capitalism, from science fiction, to business, to investigative reporting and white papers. I had thought that this week I might throw my own small stones against the wall of our peculiar economic institution. A brief elaboration of my anti-consumerism philosophy, perhaps, laid out in a bullet-pointed list, with witty caveats and sly asides. People are so fond of clever listicles, especially when the alternative is real and dark emotion.
​
But I have always been too shy and earnest to play the class clown, and besides, the rules I try to live by are so simple they hardly deserve a list: don’t buy things you don’t need; if you need things, buy them used; and if they must be new, buy goods that are well-made and expensive. You know all that already. It is no great insight of mine that our blind and unquenchable hunger is consuming the world.

On the bookshelf outside my childhood bedroom was a row of books by Adrienne Rich, and tucked inside The Dream of a Common Language was an event bill for a reading at Temple University in 1976, with the poem Power on one side, and on the other, a note to my mother in Mormor’s scratchy hand:

And I sat and listened and wept silently, self conscious about my middle-aged maudlinity until I realized that the 20 year old sitting next to me had tears running down her cheeks. Thank you for introducing me to Adrienne Rich.  - B
​
I still remember my grandmother—molecular biologist, single mother, civil rights activist, a woman too big in both mind and body for the space society gave her—every time I read the poem. It is one of my favorites. I thought of it again as I finished reading yet another great tragedy of the Anthropocene, grief and anger closed like a hand around my throat. I thought of it because Marie Curie is a perfect allegory for our civilization, because we are brilliant and beautiful, curious and endlessly inventive, willingly blind and willfully denying to the end our wounds, “denying [our] wounds came from the same source as [our] power."

POWER by Adrienne Rich
​
Living in the earth-depositis of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power

​And on a less woefully serious note, it's almost fall! Sign up for the first eight weeks of the FALL BREAD SUBSCRIPTION on the website or at market for weekly Wednesday pickups in Birchwood, downtown, or in Fairhaven. But if you want to sign up with a credit card online, you have to wait till tonight, because I'm once again running late, and out of time to update the website!
See you soon!

Sophie
Owner | Baker

​I should refrain from poking at controversial ideas at this hour of the morning, in public, before I’m quite ready to be politic or polite. I should, I know. But oh, I am contrary as a cat, and do so enjoy swatting at the curtains.

So, here it is: I am dumbfounded, disturbed, distraught by the pervasiveness of scientific illiteracy. I’m reminded of it weekly at the farmers market by the dietary lectures I receive from customers and passers by. No, I say calmly, wheat is not toxic. Actually, I cut in, rye and barley also have gluten. Yes, I’m serious. So do the ancient wheats like emmer, spelt, and einkorn. Well, I reply, smiling with all my teeth, mutation drives evolution, as well as plant breeding, so no, I don’t think it’s "unnatural." And no, plant breeding that induces mutation with radiation does not produce “bad” food. (And dammit, stop trying to hide your fears behind pseudoscience! I refrain from adding, because I do have some small sense of self-preservation).

But while swallowing the snake oil of quacks like Dr. William Davis and Dr. David Perlmutter may cause harm to people’s pocketbooks, and, more troublingly, to their food traditions, it’s no skin off my nose. Eat whatever makes you feel healthy, or safe, or morally superior.

The problem is, scientific illiteracy doesn’t stop with the eager embrace of the latest dietary prophet cloaking their food religion in scientific terms. Respectable, mainstream media outlets consistently confuse hypothesis with theory, ignoring the complexity and contradiction of real science in favor of the easy story. Environmental and political activists (including those I  respect and with whom I agree) often so abuse statistics as to undermine their credibility (and the maddening thing is, the science is there! There’s no need to cherry pick data on climate change or the public health consequences of economic inequality).

The reason all this matters, the reason I get worried when a customer proselytizes their Google-searched diet, or when I read yet another article twisting a single study into Scientific Truth, is that such a fundamental misunderstanding of the scientific method and inability to distinguish science from pseudoscience leaves people vulnerable to truly dangerous anti-science campaigns like climate change denial and the anti-vax movement. The re-emergence of preventable diseases like rubella and diphtheria, and the lack of political will to reduce fossil fuel consumption even as we hurtle towards the apocalypse, are the inevitable consequence of such ignorance.

Approach the world with curiosity and a critical eye. Ask questions. Challenge the orthodoxy of common wisdom. But oh, do so as an informed skeptic, and not as a dupe!
​
All right. That’s enough damage done for one morning. If I’ve offended you, I hope you’ll challenge me rather than walking away. I don’t have time to debate with you at the farmers market, but send me an email, or invite me to coffee, and I’ll gladly engage!

​See you soon!

Sophie
Owner | Baker

How do we know who we are, except by how we live? Marilynne Robinson asked in my ear. I stopped, elbow deep in the dough, because it was, I realized, the very question I ask myself every day in a dozen different ways. It is the heart of small, everyday decisions about how to move through the world, and large, existential decisions about work and place and community. Who do I want to be, and how do I live as that better self? And then the forward march of Robinson's powerful mind and the immediacy of the task in front of me pulled me back into motion.

Sometimes someone else articulates a thought or feeling you didn't know you had until you heard it said, and then it's so obvious, so fundamental, that you cannot imagine it unknown. We live much of our lives feeling alone in ourselves, even when surrounded by other people. The reminder that we are never truly alone, that someone else in the world, or many someones, holds in themselves the same experience, can come with a profound sense of recognition. It is a beautiful intimacy, to be so connected, even if it is across satellites, over centuries, or though the pages of a book.

When I was young I was baffled by the singularity of being myself. Why am I only this girl, and no one else? I asked. It seemed to me that I might just as easily wake up tomorrow in another mind and body. A soul was such an essential thing to be tied forever to so ephemeral and mundane a vessel (though of course I understood this in much simpler terms—if only I had kept a journal at eight!). This was also a time when I thought often about death—my own—with great curiosity and no fear. It was certainly the most mystic period of my life, in those early days of self-consciousness, when I could not understand myself separate from the universe, before I learned the designated boundaries of self and mind. And why, I wonder, did the adult world feel it so imperative to teach me those boundaries? Why did they insist I learn to be alone? Perhaps when I reach for poets like William Stafford and Mary Oliver, when reading Wendell Berry fills me so deep with joy and grief that the familiar words bring me to tears, I am reaching also for this forgotten understanding of myself in the world.

I read a psychology paper sometime early in my undergraduate arguing that we cannot have complex feelings without the words to articulate them. At the time we were also reading about deaf children raised without sign language, and the idea that their lack of language might leave them trapped not only in literal but also in mental silence was so hurtful that I wanted to reject the entire field of cognitive linguistics out of hand. Now, looking at the way that words have shaped my understanding of myself, I find the hypothesis compelling.

How do we know who we are, except by how we live? Or maybe, how do we decide how to live, except by defining ourselves?

​See you soon!

Sophie
Owner | Baker

I have spent too many daylight hours these past weeks zombie-eyed in front of a screen, shuffling through the ugly underbelly of self-employment. I have been sorting the hundreds of unread emails, gathering scattered tax documents, trying to unearth bookkeeping mistakes now so far buried there's no hope of reconciliation, working through a clunky inventory system held together with duct tape and blind stubbornness that should have been rebuilt years ago.

Because my mind is undisciplined and childish, this means I spend at least as much time wandering the twisted side streets of the internet as I do sorting through my inbox and spreadsheets. Even these frequent breaks might be useful were I taking them to read deep, or to explore the resources of the myriad organizations devoted to supporting small business. But of course, I do nothing so practical. It's social media and skimmed op-eds, late night comedy clips and back to social media. 

I emerge from these lost days bleary eyed and attention shot, craving prose that my mind is too scattered to take in and long walks long after the sun has set. 

How do you stand steady under the magnetic pull of ever-accessible media? "It's such a lucky accident, having been born, that we're almost obliged to pay attention," the poet-essayist, Mark Strand, once wrote. I want to pay attention. I want to always live a three-dimensional life. 

Sophie
Owner | Baker

And now, to business. For those who aren't signed up for a Winter Bread Subscription, or who want additional loaves, I'm baking Red & White, Mountain Rye, Pain de Méteil, and Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies to order next week. The Méteil was a staple bread in the days before roller-milled wheat flour consumed French baking. It is half wheat, half rye (méteil means meslin, a rather esoteric term for a mix of rye and wheat), and is leavened with both wheat and rye sours for a deep, complex flavor. It is often paired with hearty foods like coq au vin or strong cheese.

We're half way through the Winter Bread Subscription, which means it's almost time to start signing up for the Spring Bread Subscription! If you have any feedback on this first round or are interested in pulling together neighbors or coworkers to create your own pickup location next time around, I'd love to hear from you. 

And finally, looking past spring and into summer, I'm starting to put out feelers for a bread lover/salesperson to work the Wednesday farmers market for me next June-August. If you're interested, or know someone who might be, let's talk. ​