Along the roadsides and southern hills the blackberries are ripe. They hang fat and gleaming in the sun, tempting passing cyclists. This time of year you’ll often see me at the side of the road or pulled up on the sidewalk, bicycle discarded, hands scratched and lips purple, mouth full of sunshine.

A perfectly ripe blackberry is plump and firm between your finger tips. It separates from the stem with the gentlest tug. The attachment point is clean white. Press it between your tongue and palate and it dissolves with the sweet, dark taste of summer. For baking, though, you want sour with your sweet. Pick your berries a little firmer, a little less glossy. They separate with a twist and a snap so soft you feel it in your fingers more than hear it.

I rode back from the commissary late on Thursday. The sun had set, the sky ahead fading orange to green to white. At home, I pulled double-kneed canvas pants out of my pannier and on over my shorts, zipped my dad’s old hickory striped work shirt over my tank top, and switched my sandals for the boots just inside the door, not bothering with socks. I walked to the bottom of the garden. I was still wearing my helmet with its mounted light. The wall of brambles rose in front of me. I could hear a small creature scurrying underneath, the roar of the telephone pole factory like an airplane taking off, cars on the road behind me. On the other side of the hedge the neighbor’s dog stirred and growled on its chain. I pushed into the thorns, using the protection of pants and boots to reach deeper. The blackberries gleamed in the white light of my helmet. I filled one half flat and another till I had enough for the market bake. Then I picked up my boxes, turned off my light, and walked back to the house in the dark.

The creek is cool green and clear, running in and out of sunlight. A water ouzel bobs on a rock, hops into the riffle, and up to another rock, still bobbing. We follow her downstream, each taking our own path over algae slick rocks, over pebbles, over sandstone carved into fantastic, hollowed shapes, down waterfalls. We lose our small guide but keep going, walking in the creek or stepping stone above it, scrambling over boulders, swimming the deep pools. Water striders cast quick shadows on the sandstone. This park is in the center of the city but today no one else has ventured so far off the path. We’re alone in the dappled sunlight with the birds and striders. The running water drowns the sounds of traffic. The trailing blackberries are ripe, tiny and so sweet. We eat all we can reach, stuffing ourselves on summer.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

It’s late after a long, hot day of baking. The sky is softening gray. I’m tired and sweaty and hungry, but before I can go home to cook dinner I need five kilos of fruit.

There’s a sour cherry tree at the edge of a parking lot not far from the commissary. Maybe someone planted a food garden there once, but now the tree is part of the ornamental landscaping. I’ve never seen anyone pick its fruit but the birds and, once, an old Russian woman who told me she ate her cherries with rice.

The tree is loaded this year. I scramble up. The branches are tight and thin, tugging at my ballcap and pulling strands from my braid. I wedge a foot into a fork in the trunk, brace myself against a branch, and begin. If I squeeze the cherries just right, first finger and thumb pinching the top curve, they pop off their pits. It’s messier than picking whole fruit but will save me the time pitting later in the hot kitchen. I drop them, hollowed and dripping, into my bucket. The juice splatters my glasses. I lick my cheek and taste cherry. When I reach above me juice runs down my arm to my armpit, soaking the side of my shirt. It drips between my breasts. The oven burn on my wrist stings.

When the cord begins to bite into the back of my neck, I climb down and empty my bucket. The insides of my elbows and the backs of my knees stick together as I move. I climb back into the nest of branches.

People walk by on the sidewalk below me. Cars pass. No one looks up. With the second bucket full, I untangle myself from the tree and climb down. I’m a mess, dripping with cherry juice, bits of dried stamen and lichen speckling my arms, my throat, my chest and legs. My hair is half out of its braid, sticking to my cheeks. I walk back to the kitchen with a bucket heavy in each hand. I spread the cherries on trays in the freezer so they won’t brown overnight, wash my arms and face in the vegetable sink, and pull my hair back with clean hands. I ride home. The western sky is pale with sunset, the east darkening towards night.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

Sometimes it all goes right. Shape, color, texture, finish, the weight in my hand: all just the way I want them. But perfect bakes are rare. More often the tops are too dark, the bottoms too light. Or the loaves curl up high and tight in the unsteamed oven and blow out their sides. Or there’s a hole through the center, so that if you cut off the ends and hold a loaf to your eye you can peer down it like a spyglass. Or the rye gaps. Or the skin of the wheat tears as it rises. There are a dozen mistakes to make, a hundred, a new mistake for every day and every bake.

Back when I was young and just beginning, the ugly loaves were a personal shame. Someone, or everyone, had convinced me that results, and not effort, were the measure of one’s worth; mistakes were to be feared and avoided. This is a stupid way to live in the world. I’m still working to unlearn it.

These days I note the imperfections in my bakes with curiosity and the occasional pinch of annoyance for a mistake I should have known better than to repeat. I discount the ugly loaves and send the lot off to be eaten. Maybe with a deck oven and a mixer, or with another decade to master my craft, every bake will be beautiful. Maybe. Probably not. The grain changes with the harvest. The weather changes with the season. The sourdough changes, or the baker. Or nothing big changes and still the bread is different because even the most domesticated sourdough is still a little wild.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

Just after sunset and the clouds above Lummi are violet, rimmed with pink. The water of the delta mirrors the sky. There are three, five, no, fourteen herons walking step by deliberate step south along the flats, necks stretched straight. Every few minutes one falls on its face. They are not graceful hunters. Purple martins swoop overhead, fork-tailed silhouettes against the graying sky. They land on the nest boxes mounted high on the old pilings, then swing away and up again. The humans walking down the beach behind us are talking loudly about college Greek life. The martins ignore them. I try to do the same. An eagle wheels out from the trees, makes an aborted dive, and circles back. The sky and the water fade to gray. The island rises, massive and dark between them. The moon is a crescent from full. Herons lift off by ones and twos. When the sky is empty of swallows, we turn and walk home in the dark.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

You don’t have to go far to get away. Turn off the road. There are no paths to follow but the braided creek. It’s slow going, bushwacking through the willow and poplar, backtracking around impenetrable bramble thickets, working your way downstream. Everything is young here: the clean-scoured gravel bars, the thin trees, the sword ferns growing tender green from the debris of winter floods, the creep of trailing blackberry vines, and have you ever seen so many wild strawberries? You cross the creek barefoot, holding your sneakers and grimacing at the cold. On the next bar you find an opening in the willows wide and flat enough for a tent. You’re a quarter mile from the road, from the speeding cars, the people, the big houses, the flat, manicured lawns of this horse farm suburb, but all you can see are willows and sky. All you can hear is the water running towards the Middle Fork, towards the Nooksack, and on towards the sea.

The creek rushes by. You’re a city dweller, used to traffic, to trains, to sirens, and dogs barking. Here, the noise of the water is so loud it quiets the night. In the morning you wake to birdsong. You make coffee on the campstove, retrieve a cinnamon roll, only slightly smashed, from the bear bag you strung up between two skinny alders. The sun rises over the trees. You pack up the tent and stove, wade, barefoot and grimacing, across the creek, scramble through willow and poplar, around the bramble thickets, and back to the road.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

I hadn’t realized how much of my days are performed by rote until I broke the pattern by moving last week. I packed my sourdough somewhere and only remembered it days later, suddenly and in a panic. I forgot routine tasks—updating the webstore, sending out invoices—because every Monday morning I sit, or I sat, at the kitchen table by the window and work my way down a list of administrative chores, and without the table, the window, the notebook at my elbow next to the cup of coffee, the majority of them never crossed my mind. Even my days in the bakery were set askew, interrupted by errands and phone calls to the utility company. I managed to both underferment the wheat and overferment the vollkornbrot. On Friday nights the bread is packed and ready to load onto the market trailer, the kitchen sparkling, by 8pm; last night I stumbled out of the kitchen at midnight into a crowd of drunken revelers, with no memory of how I’d spent all those extra hours.

All that to say, some of the bread today is imperfect, and some of it is lovely. Next week I’ll do better.

The Wednesday Birchwood pickup has moved the mile west with us, though I don’t think I’ve updated the webstore with the new address. Maybe I have? I can’t remember.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

I'm discovering in myself a near bottomless capacity for indecision: shape, pattern, color, font, each a new agony. But slowly and slowly, the new logo is coming together. Perhaps by next week this email will have a different header. By the time market starts in April, there could be t-shirts, or, at the very least, a raven flag flying behind the bicycle trailer.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

Rain last night, and this morning the tops of the cedars are blurred by clouds. It’s officially spring, if not by the Julian calendar than by the forest: the nettles are up. Out past the back fence, past the thickets of rose and ironwood and the fallen willow, past the cedars and the cairn that marks the grave of Loki the dog, there’s a stand of alder. In the summer it’s all nettles, so thick you have to whack and high-step your way through and still you’ll emerge with ankles tingling. But right now the nettles are just a few leaves tall and tender, pushing up from the moss in patches. We had one pair of gloves between us; I took the right and E the left. I was clumsy at it, despite using my dominant hand, and kept accidentally pulling up the little plants when I meant only to pinch off their top leaves. E, being a farmer and much practiced at harvest, was quick and tidy. And if his bag was twice mine when we walked back through the moss and alders, past the cairn under the cedars, by the fallen willow and the thickets of the rose and ironwood, and through the back gate, well, everything went into the same pot in the end.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

I’m learning how to darn. So far I’ve inexpertly managed a few flat mends; I have yet to attempt anything advanced like sock heels or cuffs. My foray into darning was inspired by a book I picked up a few months ago from the library--Mending Life, by sisters Sonya and Nina Montenegro—which is both a practical introduction to mending clothes and an exploration of mending as a practice of healing and restoration. I returned the book weeks ago, but both its simple darning instructions and the idea that mending clothes could be an expression of a larger ethic have stuck in my mind.

What if caring for everyday objects, for people, for our communities, for land and water here and everywhere are tangled vines growing from the same roots? “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard wrote. “What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” I don’t think darning a hole in a sweater takes the place of political action, or that individual action can change systemic problems, but maybe caring for household goods is one way to appreciate the material gifts of our daily lives—the food, clothing, and objects—and our responsibility to them. Maybe mending can be a small medicine for the large hurt of living in a culture of extraction and consumption.

Sophie
Owner | Baker