   Photos in chronological order: an afternoon run in the rain and afterwards, making tea while the sky cleared and my wet clothes dried on the railing. I spent the week in a borrowed cabin on the western slope of Chuckanut Mountain. From the narrow deck I watched the sky change. I watched the water, and the boats, the islands slipping in and out of clouds. I watched a dozen kinds of birds and one busy chipmunk. When the night wind blew hard I opened the door and listened to the trees moving. When it rained, I ran up into Larabee’s tangle of trails and listened to the rain against leaves, breathing in the wet duff smell of the forest. Warm evenings I scrambled down to swim in the cold, green ocean. Every morning I rode reluctantly north to Bellingham, and every evening, riding south through downtown and Fairhaven and onto Chuckanut Drive, I was relieved again to leave behind the concrete and cars and right angles of the city. One morning, in the soft light just before sunrise, I stopped to watch a barred owl on the power line above the road. She watched me back, her deep set eyes shadowed. Cars blew by too fast, ruffling my feathers if not the owl’s. I felt an annoyed pity for the drivers, to be so seduced by convenience that they traded living inside world for passing through it, insulated by metal and speed. I was drunk on clouds and trees, on the sound of rain and on orange-pink sunsets over the Olympics. I could stay here, I thought, packing my panniers for another ride north. I could stay here, just for a day or two, just for a few weeks, just for forever. A line of poetry caught my mind and held fast. “A little way away from everywhere,” I said silently to myself riding the Interurban, running past Fragrance Lake, sunning on the warm Chuckanut sandstone after a swim. “A little way away from everywhere,” I thought, drinking weak coffee and looking out over the gray blue islands as the sky lightened. Eventually, I looked the words up. Even in the woods I had a cell phone. It was a line from Mary Oliver’s “A Dream of Trees,” a poem warning against retreat from the hard and sorrowful human world. Had my subconscious purposefully pulled a piece of this poem up out of thousands of lines, the hundreds of poems I’ve read and forgotten? Or was it coincidence that on my little blue screen Mary Oliver echoed my own longing: “I would have time, I thought, and time to spare, / With only streams and birds for company, / To build of my life a few wild stanzas.” But, of course, she goes on, “And then it came to me, that so was death, / A little way away from everywhere.” Ah, I thought, reading the poem through once, and again. Ah, well. The words felt true. I copied them out in my notebook and then sat, thinking about the peace of wild places, about what makes a good and meaningful life, about living fully inside the world. Reluctantly, I let go my soft, romantic daydream of a hermitage in the hills. There would be no hiding away in the forest from the hard-edges and injustices of the city. I would not stay forever here among the trees, but I would return. “as the times implore our true involvement, / The blades of every crisis point the way. / I would it were not so, but so it is. / Who ever made music of a mild day?” Sophie Owner | Baker TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Herb & Olive Oil Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot Seedy Buckwheat Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Gingersnap Oat Scone with Blackberries & Plums Plum Cake Savory Tomato Tart Shortbread This week in the Bread Subscription Red & White Mountain Rye Baker's Choice: Herb & Olive Oil  We went into the mountains, walking through forest, across alpine meadows, and up onto the high heather. On the knob of Yellow Aster Butte I turned and turned: Baker and Shuksan were hazy to the south, the teeth of the Skagit Range to the east, and just across the valley America Border Peak rose sharp and rust stained from Tomyhoi Lake. Below the butte we followed crisscrossing desire lines to the deepest of the alpine lakes and dove into the clear, cold water. Afterward, we lay quiet on the rocks like sunning snakes. I came down from the mountains brighter, my mind clear as the lake water. I was made of muscle and bone and wonder. Love for the land, for my Northwestern home, expanded in my chest, squeezing worry and self-doubt and the anxiety of Sisyphusian to-do lists down to their small and proper size. After the mountains, the city felt flat and slightly unreal. Inside the boxes of buildings there was no sky, no wind, no rain squalls, no air. Outside the walls, asphalt and turf grass hid the earth. The visceral wonder that had filled me softened and settled into memory. Worries and doubts grew back into the spaces it left behind. Under the bright, fluorescent lights of the kitchen I felt my mountain brightness dimming. At the end of a long day of baking, hungry for the sky, I took my dinner out back behind the house and sat on top of the picnic table facing the garden. The garden is fenced with fishing nets we salvaged from a net dumpster at the marina and hung like a shower curtain on wire stapled between scrap wood posts. The first fence we built was eight feet at the corners, sagging to six at the nadir of the wire’s parabola. All last summer and fall we found hoof prints postholing through newly planted beds. One morning I walked out to find the bean vines stripped naked, all the leaves bitten away. This spring we rehung the net ten feet high at the corners. The beans are lush with leaves and red flowers. I admired the riot of flowers as the light faded: the scarlet runner beans, the banks of volunteer borage and calendula, the cascading nasturtiums, and the sturdy sunflowers standing sentry over the beds. When I heard her steps in the dry grass I stilled, waiting. She passed ten feet in front of me. Every few steps she turned dark eyes and those big, expressive ears towards me, wary but unafraid. I didn't move. At the fence she stopped, nose to the net, gazing for long minutes into the feast of irrigated green. Mule deer are nearly as common as grey squirrels here at the edge of the city. She was unremarkable and very beautiful. The wonder swelled inside me. See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Rosemary Potato Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot Seedy Buckwheat Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Gingersnap Oat Scone Shortbread Blackberry Apricot Slab Pie Wednesday bread this week: Red & White, Mountain Rye, Baker's Choice: WILD & SEEDY Sign up for the LATE SUMMER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION Every Wednesday, August 7 - September 25  I took the long way home. The night was wet and so warm I rolled my sleeves up above the elbow and undid the buttons at my neck while I waited at a stoplight. After the day’s heat, scents bloomed in the light rain. I rode open mouthed, tasting the city on my tongue. I wanted to remember each night smell, I wanted to find the adjectives and metaphors to hold them, but they were subtle and I was moving too fast. Between one breath and the next, they changed and were gone. See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Herb & Olive Oil Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot Seedy Buckwheat Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Gingersnap Oat Scone Shortbread Strawberry Rhubarb Slab Pie Wednesday bread this week: Red & White, Mountain Rye, Baker's Choice: MILK & HONEY  Late February already, and the crocuses push up through the moss and grass, violet and yellow against the brightening green. The birds are all out at once: robins probing the lawn, warblers gossiping in the hedgerows, mallards and mergansers crowding the water, and in the stubbled fields flocks of swans browse, their necks bent like white question marks to the untilled earth. Skiing last weekend over Lightening Lake I squinted into the cold, trying to read the shape of the land in the flat light. The snow was depthless, the hills on either side dark and close, the sky low. The landscape felt too austere for beauty after the noise and exuberance of our temperate spring. But when the sky opened on a patch of western blue and the low sun lit the clouds’ heavy bellies warm gold, lit the hills and lake, lit my face and chest and the cold fronts of my thighs, I stood still, caught by the light. Sophie Owner | Baker THIS WEEK's WEDNESDAY BREAD Order by Sunday night to pick up Wednesday, Feb 27 Red & White Mountain Rye Baker's Choice: Quince & Rye THE LAST WEDNESDAY BREAD (till April) Order this week for pickup Wednesday, Mar 6 Red & White Mountain Rye Baker's Choice: Black Bread Order ONLINE and pickup on Wednesdays from: Downtown: Cafe Velo, 120 Prospect, 9am - 7pm Fairhaven: Shirlee Bird Cafe, 1200 Harris, 7:30am - 5pm Birchwood: the front step, 8am - 8pm  I won’t always write about walking. As summer approaches the work begins to tighten around my days, squeezing out the spare hours till moving through the world becomes purely functional: cycling for transportation, running for exercise, driving for hauling impossible loads or covering impossible distances. Then I’ll write about baking, or cycling, or perhaps running. But now, in the slow heart of winter, I have time to walk. The time I take to walk without direction is often the truest part of my day. The chores and routine work, the hours absorbed by the blue glow of my screens, the casual interactions with friends and strangers, these so easily blur till the days slip by into unremembered months. Perhaps what I find in walking is the sort of moving meditation others seek in yoga or martial arts. Walking brings time into focus, makes me fully embodied and awake to my surroundings. Already, most of the hours I spent indoors yesterday are slipping from my memory, but I remember so well the yellow of the willow branches and the clean cut of snow against wet pebbles at the high tide line. I remember the cold of the wind and the heat of my body. I remember the sound of wings, and looking up to see crows silhouetted against the white blue sky, flying north. Sophie Owner | Baker THIS WEEK's WEDNESDAY BREAD Order by Sunday night to pick up Wednesday, Feb 20 Red & White Mountain Rye Baker's Choice: Sour Ring Bread NEXT WEEK's WEDNESDAY BREAD Order this week for pickup Wednesday, Feb 27 Red & White Mountain Rye Baker's Choice: undecided Order ONLINE and pickup on Wednesdays from: Downtown: Cafe Velo, 120 Prospect, 9am - 7pm Fairhaven: Shirlee Bird Cafe, 1200 Harris, 7:30am - 5pm Birchwood: the front step, 8am - 8pm  Last Sunday we climbed above treeline and into the dusty blue of high mountain sunshine where the larches blazed orange gold and Cascade blueberries lit the hillsides in red fire. Just below Maple Pass, the mountains around us alive with light, another hiker let out a wild whoop, and the mountains echoed back his joy. We need a language of place, I think, to speak the wonder of this landscape. A verb for the way the late autumn sun backlights turning leaves. Another for the blue fading of mountains, each line of peaks paler than the one before till they disappear into the sky. I want a word for the sudden temperature change when you walk from sunshine into shadow, and one for the pockets of cool air held in low, damp places. What is the word for stones sunk into frost heaved ground, for the lacy trim of ice crystals along the edges of leaves, for the way bare branches rimmed in ice glitter in low sunlight? In his beautiful, demanding book on the importance of landscape language, Robert Macfarlane writes, "by instrumentalizing nature, linguistically and operationally, we've largely stunned the earth out of wonder. Language is fundamental to the possibility of re-wonderment, for language does not just register experience, it produces it. The contours and colors of words are inseparable from the feelings we create in relation to situations, to others, and to places." If we spoke the language of the mountains and sound, would we name the daily wonder of this place? Would we see our landscape more clearly, love it more deeply, and protect it more fiercely in a changing world?   TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Oat & Honey Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot Chocolate Malt Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Oatmeal Scone Buckwheat Scone Gingerbread Brown Butter + Nibby Buckwheat Shortbread WEDNESDAY BREAD SUBSCRIPTION (Pick up bread every Wednesday Sept 5 - Nov 21. Sign up anytime.) Buckwheat & Honey Mountain Rye I get caught in the routine of my life. It’s a good routine, bounded by meaningful work, extravagant dinner parties, and too many books. What gaps there are are easily filled by the endless backlog of projects: harvesting and putting up fruit, readying the garden for winter, researching breads, business planning, house chores, etc. There’s always more to do, as you well know. No need to look elsewhere for ways to fill the hours. And so it is a startling pleasure to step out of routine and into the wider world, like stepping out into sunshine after a day spent indoors. Last Saturday a friend texted just as market was ending to ask if I wanted to canoe the Nooksack delta. I usually turn down Saturday night invitations out of hand: parties, dancing, films, none can compete with the lure of a quiet evening at home. As market ends, I’m daydreaming about unfolding a heavy wool blanket under the long-needled pine in the back yard and sitting there with a book, notebook, and pen, with the smell of dry forest around me and the tree above, till the dark or cold force me inside. But the delta. All that sky and smooth water. That was different. “Yes,” I wrote back, ignoring the next customer. “What time do you want to leave?” We parked by the side of the road and carried the canoe past No Trespassing signs and into the lazy river. The water slid, green and sunlit, between alder and willow. Ducks flew up before us. A beaver watched us pass, slipping silently under water when we circled back for another look. I listened to the dip of our paddles, the beating of duck wings, and the distant sound of airplanes. When the forest opened into the delta it was almost sunset. The water was a glossy mirror to the sky. Here, a ten minute drive and a quick paddle from my house, with Bellingham just across the bay, we looked out towards Lummi, over luminous water under a luminous sky, and the whole world was made of light. This was better than any book under the pine tree. Better, even, than coming home to dinner on the table and a house full of friends. The delta filled me like a deep breath, and when I exhaled, the light remained.  See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Oat & Honey Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot Chocolate Malt Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Oatmeal Scone Buckwheat Scone Apple & Cream Cake Brown Butter + Nibby Buckwheat Shortbread WEDNESDAY BREAD SUBSCRIPTION (Pick up bread every Wednesday Sept 5 - Nov 21. Sign up anytime.) Toasted Sesame Mountain Rye  The path cut a narrow line through fir and head high salal, leaves glossy dark in the rain. We walked single file till the forest opened into a thin strip of prairie and rock above San Juan Channel. The islands across the water were soft gray against a gray sky. Below us, the tide ran in a fast river through the kelp beds. Two sea lions cruised up the channel, casual against the current. Gulls and harbor seals fished the kelp. The gulls paid us no mind. The seals watched us, a baby and two adults, with round, liquid eyes. We scrambled down the rocks to stand at the edge of deep water, looking in. One seal swam closer. We could see her fat, sleek body through the water, her dark speckled back, and the rust-orange wash across her pale belly. She swam parallel to our rock, and then looped around the other way. She twisted and spun, back and forth in the green water. We stood still in the rain and watched her dance for a long time. Every time she surfaced, she was facing us. She would tip her head slightly, to the right, and then to the left, like a human tipping water out of her ears, then roll back below the surface. Eventually, the others wandered away to explore up the coastline. I stood alone at the edge. The seal’s sleek head popped up, dark eyes on our rock. She looked at me and tipped her head, to the right, and then to the left. Then she slipped back under the rain pebbled water and swam away into the kelp. An audience of one was not enough. TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Oat & Honey Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies Oatmeal Scone Plum Cake Shortbread WEDNESDAY BREAD SUBSCRIPTION Red Wheat & Apple Mountain Rye 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 Can you ever be all the way outside in the city? Can you be outside when you stand on a concrete floor, walled in by buildings, with the roar of traffic ebbing and flooding like the tide, changing birdsong and your brain, and the the petro-smell of too many cars rising up from the roads with every warm rain? , Last night I rode home under a hot pink sunset, keeping one eye on the sky, the other on the cars and the boozy sidewalk crowds. The night was sound and color around me. I remembered other night rides. I remembered riding through the country night and feeling the air change. The hollows were cool damp, already collecting mist, and the night smells were as loud as the frog choruses: forest mulch and fir, nootka rose, dust, flowering clover and meadow grass, and the warm smell of the cattle. It made me feel so wildly alive, pedaling through the complicated dark, with only the shadows of the hedgerows to mark the road, and not a single headlight to break the night all the way home. See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies Oatmeal Marmalade Scone Buckwheat Strawberry Scone Rhubarb Strawberry Galette Shortbread WEDNESDAY MARKET Red & White Toasted Sesame Mountain Rye Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies Scone, Shortbread, Galette |