 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 All the way up I thought about the end of the world. The night before I’d stayed late deep cleaning the bakery and listening to Bill McKibbin talk about climate and capitalism. It was a hard story to hear. I worked till after one, went home to shower and sleep and dream apocalyptic dreams, biked my morning’s deliveries, and fled to the mountains. All the way up I thought about neoliberalism and exploitation, about inequality and power, about the ocean become desert, about atmospheric oxygen dropping, about heat and fire, rising tides and rising floodwaters, the wild gone, the animals gone, the forests gone. When my grandchildren walk this path, I thought, the mountains will still be standing, but will the trees? Will the cedars, the firs, the hemlock and spruce? What of the willow thickets, the vine maples, the red alders with their leaves wet and gleaming in the soft light? The forest, with its carpet of new green, its mossy boulders and thick ferns, its orchids and trillium, its snowmelt streams falling in white ribbons down the mountainside, was so beautiful it broke my heart. We walked in the clouds. The birds were quiet. The rain fell soft against leaves and loud against our coats. Up we walked, and up. We were wet from hats to socks despite our Gortex. When I bent down to lift the face of an orchid, water streamed from my hood. For a moment, we could see the far ridgeline though the shifting mist and trees, and then it was gone again. Somewhere up in the snowfields above treeline my mind quieted, though the climate grief remained, a familiar ache in my throat. It was colder in the open and we soon lost the trail. The snow was rotten with hidden streams. We turned and followed our footprints back to the wet, green forest. After a time the rain stopped. We walked down into sunlight. Sophie Owner | Baker  TODAY AT MARKET and NEXT WEEK FOR MARKET PREORDER 10am – 2pm, 1100 Railroad Ave BREAD: Red & White ($7.50 / 720g) Mountain Rye ($7.50 / 750g) Vollkornbrot ($8 / 750g) Elwha River Spelt ($8 / 750g) Seedy Buckwheat ($8 / 420g) SWEETS: Gingersnap Cookies ($5 / 2) Chocolate Chip Hazelnut Cookies ($5 / 2) Rhubarb Snack Cake ($5) Brown Butter Shortbread ($9 / half dz) Hazelnut Shortbread ($9 / half dz) SUMMBER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION 9 WEEKS REMAINING Every Wednesday, June - August Pickups in Birchwood, Columbia, Lettered Streets, South Hill, Fairhaven. RED & WHITE Subscription - wholemeal wheat table bread. MOUNTAIN RYE Subscription - seedy rye & wheat tinned bread. TOAST Subscription - a new type of tinned wheat bread every week. Next WEDNESDAY PICKUP Self-serve pickups in Birchwood, Columbia, Lettered Streets, South Hill, and Fairhaven. Address and directions with your pickup reminder email Wednesday morning. Order by Sunday night. Red & White Mountain Rye Toast: TOASTED CORN Special guest: BITTERSWEET CHOCOLATE Rye friends, I managed to collapse the entire batch of Vollkornbrot. I’m sorry! If you don’t want to wait till next Saturday, I’m adding Vollkorn to this Wednesday’s bake as well. Orders due by Sunday night. Pickups in Birchwood, Columbia, Lettered Streets, South Hill, Fairhaven. This also means I have 30% less bread today at market, so come early!  Quiet in the high meadows. We left the snowshoes strapped to our packs and walked out, skirting meltholes, watchful for rotten snow over the streams. The snow was wet and firm. We kicked upwards to the knob and sat to eat our lunch—sandwiches, an entire pound cake, a thermos of hot coffee—looking out at the dark firs, the shifting clouds, the brief glimpses of distant ridgeline, rocky and white and gone again. Afterwards we boot-skied down the meadows and crossed back into the forest, down from the snow and clouds and back to earth. The roar of the Nooksack rose as we descended the switchbacks, and so did the light. By the time we reached the road the forest was aglow around us: the shining leaves of the vine maples, the bright, shaggy moss, the foxglove and columbine and little white flowers in exuberant bloom. Halfway down the service road I made E stop the truck so I could stand and stare at the dazzling green. Sophie Owner | Baker  TODAY AT MARKET and NEXT WEEK FOR MARKET PREORDER 10am – 2pm, 1100 Railroad Ave BREAD: Red & White ($7.50 / 720g) Mountain Rye ($7.50 / 750g) Vollkornbrot ($8 / 750g) Seedy Buckwheat ($8 / 420g) SWEETS: Gingersnap Cookies ($5 / 2) Chocolate Chip Hazelnut Cookies ($5 / 2) Raspberry Rhubarb Rye Snack Cake! ($5) Brown Butter Shortbread ($9 / half dz) Hazelnut Shortbread ($9 / half dz) SUMMBER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION 10 WEEKS REMAINING Every Wednesday*, June - August Pickups in Birchwood, Columbia, Lettered Streets, South Hill, Fairhaven. RED & WHITE Subscription - wholemeal wheat table bread. MOUNTAIN RYE Subscription - seedy rye & wheat tinned bread. TOAST Subscription - a new type of tinned wheat bread every week. Next WEDNESDAY PICKUP Self-serve pickups in Birchwood, Columbia, Lettered Streets, South Hill, and Fairhaven. Address and directions with your pickup reminder email Wednesday morning. Order by Sunday night. Red & White Mountain Rye Toast: BUCKWHEAT & MOLASSES Special guest: VOLLKORNBROT Getting towards dusk and the sky is a crow highway. They fly over in twos and twenties, dropping south, wing-beating, gliding, dipping and rolling like ravens. They’re gathering at the old boat house where they strut and hop over the lawn, blacken the trees, fluff and shake in the shallows. The sky is dream blue: pale and streaked white yellow purple with thin clouds. To the north and east, the mountains glow. The ducks are rafted up on the lake, the stragglers flying in low and hard, skidding to a bright spray stop on the water. There’s a single cormorant standing in black silhouette above a white buoy, and here, on the snag exposed by the winter-low water, a stiff-legged painted turtle immobilized by the cold. All the way home I’m running against traffic, northbound as the crows fly south in the lowering dark. Sophie Owner | Baker The WINTER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION starts January 22 and runs for 10 weeks through March 25. Pickup in Birchwood (the front step), Downtown (Cafe Velo), or in Fairhaven (Shirlee Bird Cafe). Sign up ONLINE. RED & WHITE subscription ($70) MOUNTAIN RYE subscription ($70) BAKER's CHOICE subscription ($80) BAKER's CHOICE menu: all rye all winter long! Jan 22: Rugbrod Jan 29: Ring Rye Feb 5: Apple Rye Feb 12: Harvest Miche 1 Feb 19: Harvest Miche 2 Feb 26: Black Bread March 4: Alpine Spice Rye March 11: Rye & Oat March 18: Korn Rye or Corn Rye?? March 25: Westphalian Pumpernickel! “What’s your favorite fruit?” you asked me. I stuttered and stalled. My favorite fruit? How could I ever choose just one? But I have an answer now: satsumas. If I had a box I would sit down right here and eat them all, one after another, the peels scattered like petals on the floor around me, till my teeth felt matte and my tongue stung with the acid. Yesterday at the store I bought only a foolish handful, and ate them all standing at the end of the checkout line, waiting for the cashier to weigh up the rest of my groceries. Next week, when these firm haychiya soften and glow jewel orange against the light, my answer will be persimmon. And at the end of the long, fruitless spring, when the first tiny strawberries appear at market, how could I not love them best? But apricots. But mangoes sucked down to loose skin under the equatorial sun, and that first real banana, creamy and fragrant like no Cavendish I’d ever tasted. But blueberries by the fistful. But dense, floral apples and sun-hot figs. But Himalayan blackberries that smell like all the cracked sidewalk summers of my childhood. I’ve loved each, loved the soft hard heavy feel of them, loved breathing in their taste as it opened on my tongue, loved their colors and the textures of their skin. And is my love less for being so bright and brief, for turning as the seasons turn so that it always faces this moment, now, and the perfect fruit I’m holding in my hand? Sophie Owner | Baker This is the second to last market of the year! We'll be closed from Dec 22 until the Winter Bread Subscription starts up on Jan 22. Place orders for the last market ONLINE with a credit card or at MARKET with cash or check. Preorders (menu listed below) are due by TOMORROW for pickup at the last market, Saturday, Dec 21 HOLIDAY SWEETS Gingerbread Bundt Chocolate Babka Pain d'Epices (made with honey, rye, and spices, mixed and aged for 18 months!! to deep, sweet complexity.) Hazelnut & Oat Snowballs Apple Oat Scones. Plus Malted Chocolate Chip, Bittersweet Chocolate, Gingersnap, and Shortbread Cookies. FILL YOUR PANTRY! Red & White (1.5 kg) Mountain Rye (2.3 kg) Vollkornbrot (2.3 kg) Seedy Buckwheat (1.3 kg) WINTER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION Every Wednesday for 10 weeks, Jan 22 - March 25 Pickup in Birchwood, Downtown, or in Fairhaven RED & WHITE subscription ($70) MOUNTAIN RYE subscription ($70) BAKER's CHOICE subscription ($80) BAKER's CHOICE menu: all rye all winter long! Jan 22: Rugbrod Jan 29: Ring Rye Feb 5: Apple Rye Feb 12: Harvest Miche 1 Feb 19: Harvest Miche 2 Feb 26: Black Bread March 4: Alpine Spice Rye March 11: Rye & Oat March 18: Korn Rye or Corn Rye?? March 25: Westphalian Pumpernickel! TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot Seedy Buckwheat CHOCOLATE BABKA Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Gingersnap Cookie Hazelnut Snowballs Apple Scone Gingerbread Cake Shortbread Buckwheat Crisps PAIN d'EPICES I'll be donating 10% of sales this month to organizations working for social and environmental justice. The wind was so strong my hood blew back and I grabbed for my hat. We squinted, pushing forward down the spit. At the point I climbed up on a knot of driftwood, into the white cap spray, into the wild air, into the clear, blue sky. The wind blew me down. I climbed up again and the wind knocked me back to earth. Up and down, up and down, laughing with joy. When we turned back towards home, we flew. Sophie Owner | Baker   We will NOT BE AT MARKET today. Order Mountain Rye, Red & White, or Baker's Choice (this week it's a Finnish-inspired Black Bread!) online for Wednesday pickup. See you at the market next Saturday. It happens this way sometimes after deep emotion. It happens this way after rage or sorrow, after wonder or happiness: I find myself adrift, feeling tender and inexplicably melancholy. Long hours in the closed box of the commissary didn’t help. Thinking about my mormor while I mixed made me cry. Listening to an interview with Robert Macfarlane as I shaped the loaves filled my chest and squeezed my throat with longing. When I queued up a song from the interview, a song washed up from the widening ripples of Macfarlane’s book, Landmarks, the music broke over me like a wave, leaving me drenched and breathless. At the end of my midweek deliveries I stopped at the cafe to drink espresso and reread my favorite chapters of Landmarks, wrapping myself in the room’s familiar warmth while familiar people came and went around me. But at home in my quiet house, the melancholy again pressed close. Instead of opening my laptop to start the week’s administrative work, I curled up in the sunshine on my bed and fell asleep. I woke rested and restless. I lay for a while, staring out the window at the sunlit trees, and then got up and went downstairs, tied on my running shoes, and took off for the water. The wind cooled my face and throat, slid into my curled palms and up the inside of my arms, chilled the sweat in the crease of my elbows. I breathed through my mouth, tasting wet earth and leaf mold on the back of my tongue. The bay, when I reached it, was a brilliant blue darkening out towards the paler blue islands, under a white blue sky. The water and sky, the bright snowberries and the glossy, red rosehips in the hedgerows, the peaks of Baker and Twin Sisters gleaming over the hill behind me, the little brown rabbit watching from the striped shadows of dried chicory and thistle on the hillside, they were all beautiful. My left shoe was squeaking, a small, surprised noise every time I rolled forward on the ball of my foot. I ran to the top of the park and let gravity pull me down, arms loose, stride wide, feet pounding. And then up the steep, washed-out trail beside the stairs, pushing hard with quads and lungs. Down and up, down and up, till my muscles shivered and I gasped for breath. After the last climb I took off my shoes, tied the laces together, and tucked my socks inside. I walked home barefoot, feeling the cold earth, feeling the gravel too sharp for my shoe-soft soles, feeling the ungiving pavement and the wet moss at the border between lawn and street that squeezed out icy water like a wrung sponge. “We have come to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world,” Macfarlane wrote, “—its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits—as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb. We are literally ‘losing touch’, becoming disembodied.” I did not have the work-productive Wednesday I’d planned, not the day of spreadsheets and email; it was a good day. By evening, as I stood talking to friends in our steamy kitchen, I felt settled. “Living in one sense at a time to live all the way through” had anchored me again to my body, and my body to the world. See you at market, maybe. Sophie Owner | Baker I had meant to start prep for THANKSGIVING ORDERS this week, but I'm nothing if not predictable: I haven't yet begun. Which means orders are still open if you need bread or pastry for your holiday table. Pickups Wednesday 11/27 at Cafe Velo between 9am and 7pm. Sweets: Apple Cake, Gingerbread Bundt Breads: Rosemary Rolls, Red & White, Roasted Potato & Garlic (and Mountain Rye, but it's under the regular Wednesday Bread heading, just to make the process more convoluted) Also, we will NOT BE AT MARKET next Saturday, 11/30, because I want to eat dinner Thursday with my family, when I'd otherwise be starting fermentation for the market. TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Rosemary Cornmeal (for stuffing! and eating, of course) Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot Seedy Buckwheat Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Gingersnap Cookie Apple Scone (jamless, strawberry jam, marmalade) Gingerbread Cake Apple Cake with Cultured Cream Shortbread Buckwheat Crisps ,It’s been years since I’ve spent a day alone. Not without people alone, or at least, not only that. I mean alone without conversation, without books or screens or radio for company, without work. Often, the minutes of my bike commute are the only time I spend alone all day, and even those I sometimes interrupt with a text message or a quick, pointless check of Instagram. In the clutter and noise of my daily life I begin to think distraction is normal. I begin to think that productivity is important, forgetting that being present—to my work, to a conversation, to rain and sky and the strength of my body when I run—is what matters most. Often, it’s artists and writers who speak about stillness as a daily practice, about making time for meditation or boredom, for daydreaming or walking without direction, but I think such time alone is something we all need.  I remember the last day I spent alone. I was still living in the islands. It was Yom Kippur, late fall and damp cold. I drove the truck to Shark Reef and walked out to the rocks above San Juan Channel where I sat for hours, watching the water, the sky, two sea lions cruising north against the tide. I sat and thought about my mormor, who had died that February, and about other things I’ve long forgotten. But eight years later I still remember the feeling. I still remember the anxiety of having nothing to do, nothing to distract me; I remember the beauty and stillness of that gray, fall day, and the wonder of being part of it. Sophie Owner | Baker TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Oat & Honey Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot Seedy Buckwheat Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Gingersnap Oat Scone Gingerbread Cake Apple Cake with Cultured Cream Shortbread Buckwheat Crisps (I tried to make you Pan de Muerto, too. They look beautiful, but I ate one this morning and... I forgot the salt. So instead you'll be getting bread pudding next week.) FALL BREAD SUBSCRIPTION 9 weeks remaining Every Wednesday, OCT 2 - DEC 18 Pickup downtown, Birchwood, Fairhaven This week: Mountain Rye, Red & White, POLENTA And then the storm was on top of me. The power went out. I sat on the front porch and watched the lightning cut white though the sky. Thunder rolled over me, light and noise and the house trembling all at once. Afterwards, quiet, and I was laughing with joy, alone in the dark. Sophie Owner | Baker TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Oat & Honey Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot Seedy Buckwheat Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Gingersnap Oat Scone Gleaner's Apple Pie Shortbread Buckwheat Crisps This week in the Bread Subscription Red & White Mountain Rye Baker's Choice: RUGBROD |