 The moon wobbled and the tide went out. I walked the edge of the Nooksack delta from Squalicum. The gleaming sand was a mirror to the sky, clouds above and clouds below. I stood at the water’s edge looking out. The incoming tide rushed my ankles and I had the dizzying feeling of the earth moving under me as I stood still.
Sophie Owner | Baker We walked out from Locust Beach. A layer of fine, organic particulate covered the last feet of cobbles—bits of leaves and wood and mud—alarmingly looses and deep. We sunk in past our ankle as we picked our way out beyond the old posts with their crooked nest boxes, still empty of martins, and onto firm ground. We walked out and out, aimed towards the gleam of water. The sediment was finely graded silt, and clay in the shallow dips and rises. I wiggled my feet down into the silt. The clay was pleasantly sticky. The water, when we reached it, was shallow and warm. We kept walking. The tide was still retreating. We aimed towards a ribbon of darker blue, dotted with shapes that became five, ten, dozens of eagles and a lone fishing heron. “The main channel has shifted west,” my friend said. “We could probably walk almost all the way,” and he pointed to the distant peninsula. We had been walking for most of an hour and both had work still to do. We turned back. I could no longer see the posts. The shore was a smear of green trees and brown sand where the bluff had slumped down to the beach, and on top of the bluff the ugly boxes of developments, like matching toy houses set along the land’s edge. South and east the city rose up from the crescent of Bellingham Bay, framed by dark hills. To the north and west the braided mouth of the Nooksack and the peninsula were a single low, green mass. The retreating water had exposed huge, rolling ripples running perpendicular to the shore.  I imagined turning and following one of those sand bars. Imagined it from an eagle’s eye view, bent around the river’s mouth, and me small as an ant, walking its curve. Instead, we negotiated a point on the shore to aim towards, half way between the old cement plant and where the bluffs dipped down to the beach. We walked back, adjusting our trajectory as the land came into focus. Our shoes were where we’d left them at the edge of the rocky beach.
Sophie Owner | Baker I left the bakery before the work was done: bread still cooling on the rack, floors unswept, tables and sinks not yet wiped down. I left because I was tired and restless and because I missed the sky. The rain had stopped. The streets and bars were filling. I cut south through the alley. Gray water wicked up the sides of my thin-soled bakery shoes. I was surrounded by concrete and traffic and noisy crowds, and then I was on the Interurban and alone under the green arch of trees. Fifty feet above me cars still roared down Boulevard, the ugly condos loomed, but on the trail the engines were overlaid with evening birdsong. The air was wet and green. I tasted wild roses blooming before I saw them. I took off my wet shoes. The sharp press of gravel felt good after twelve hours of standing on flat floors. Small rabbits watched me from the grass at the edge of the trail, darting away into the underbrush when I got close. I stopped to watch crows mob an eagle, to look out through the trees at the bright water. I walked till the trail bent across the railroad tracks and the trees opened into the grassy expanse of the park. Past the kids tossing a frisbee, past the couples on benches and the dog walkers, the steep, man-made beach was empty. I found my place at its edge. The gray water, gray islands, gray sky were quiet. To the north the Coast Range gleamed in the last light. After five minutes or thirty I put my shoes on and walked back to the trail, down the darkening green tunnel, through the alley, and into the bakery. The bread was cool enough to bag. I finished the work and rode home in the dark. Sophie Owner | Baker  I left the loaves cooling on the rack last night and caught the final bus south because Pjörk—the pink pig who lived for a few months in our yard with her black sister, Björk—was possibly farrowing. All the way through the Chuckanuts it poured. I watched bright trees blur outside my window and regretted my cotton bakery clothes. But as the bus rolled into the Skagit flats the sky lifted. I rode to the farm under high, scattering clouds. I found Erik in the barn. Pjörk was restless, overturning cinder blocks, gnawing on boards, laying down and standing up and laying down again. We left for a time and when we came back her pen was empty. Under one hog panel gaped a two foot gap. She had nosed it up the t-posts and walked out. Erik found her wandering through the long cover crop and out into a newly tilled field. We herded her back, closed up the pen, and slid the barn door closed till a gap just wide enough for the barn swallows remained. Pjörk returned to overturning objects and laying, panting, in the straw. In the end I went to bed. When I left to catch the first bus back north she was still on her side in a nest of straw, breathing hard, her teats so full of milk they looked painful. Sometime later today, perhaps, there will be a new pile of piglets for Erik to worry over and admire. Sophie Owner | Baker  There are little brown birds foraging outside the kitchen window. One lands on a leaning dandelion stem and carries the seed head to the ground where he attacks it vigorously, white tufts flying around him. I flip through A Field Guide to Western Birds, left on the windowsill for just this purpose, but can’t match the white striped heads and clay colored backs to any of the drawings. Wren? Warbler? Chickadee? I don’t know. Little brown birds. Seed eaters. I stand admiring them while the water boils. The chaos of our yard seems to please the animals neighbors, if not, perhaps, the human. There are brush piles, wood chip piles, piles of old cedar fence blown down in winter storms that shelter small, hopping birds and the occasional rabbit. The grass in back has grown long and tufted, well beyond the reach of our second hand mower, and full of bolting weeds. Three does, patchy from winter, wander through most days at dawn or dusk. We chase them away halfheartedly and lean old fence panels across the garden’s unfinished gates. Crows and robins probe the newly forked vegetable beds. There are blackcap chickadees nesting in a knothole at the top of the apple tree—branches too close to the house, the fruit small and mealy—that we limbed, girdled, and left standing as an interesting and unsightly snag. Soon, I hope, the Pacific tree frogs will come hopping back from wherever it is they spend their winters. Coffee brewed, I return to the window. The birds are gone, leaving behind the murdered dandelion. I carry the mug to my desk and sit to write the morning’s note. Sophie Owner | Baker  Kitchen garden and house: works in progress. The citrus trees arrived last week: a meyer lemon and a chinotto orange, the two most fragrant bloomers in the One Green World catalog. They’re for the southern patio of this not-quite-real-yet bakery I’m planning, but for the time being the orange is in our greenhouse and the lemon, still wrapped up in its half gallon pot, sits on the window sill in full, glorious bloom. Keep an eye out for big ceramic planters, will you? I’ve been watching Craigslist for weeks without success.
Bakery planning is stalled at the contractors' estimates (months! it’s been months!). I need those numbers to make the project budget, sign the lease, finalize the design, submit permits, seek financing. Until then its all just ideas on paper. Still, the lemon tree in the window is real enough. I can see its dark, glossy leaves out of the corner of my eye as I sit at my desk, scrolling through used equipment auctions or rearranging a digital floor plan I’d rather be building. The scent of lemon blossoms fills the room. Sophie Owner | Baker I got my first box of rhubarb from Broadleaf Farms this week (buckwheat rhubarb snack cake) and the chickens at Well Fed Farms are all at once laying (braided challah). Last weekend, in the lingering dusk, we had friends over for a backyard fire. We charred potatoes in the embers and burned marshmallows in the flames. I made graham crackers for the smores and because they were such a sweet and brittle pleasure am now experimenting cinnamon and oats (cinnamon oat crisps). We have lots of lovely bread and sweets at market for you today. I'll be wandering through while Ezra holds down the stand.
See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker I wish I had bread rhapsodies for you, or even some photos of the market bake (it’s a good one), but I took no pictures yesterday and with the baking done my mind has turned towards the garden. There are so many urgent spring projects: fencing, brick setting, sheet mulching, planting, propagation, the noxious weeds to dig and dig and dig again.
Last weekend we buried more lawn under cardboard and manure and planted the beginnings of our berry beds with highbush blueberries, black and red currants, and strawberries. A friend delivered a few lingonberries last night, and a German wine grape. Right now, sitting at my desk with the window cracked let in birdsong and the bright morning air, I’m fighting the impulse to go outside and put roots into the cold, damp earth. But first the farmers market. If I have dirt under my fingernails you'll know I gave in to the green song of growing things and snuck out for a quick dip in the garden before biking downtown. See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker All things considered, the bake for the first Saturday farmers market of the season went smoothly. Sure, I left the oven on high and scorched the Mountain Rye crust (discounted, the insides are still lovely), and added extra hours to the day by managing the preferments poorly, but there were no unmitigated disasters. We'll have a table full of lovely breads and sweets for you at the Market Depot from 10-2.
See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker Last night we picked nettles by the barn, volunteer arugula along the driveway, and the few purple sprouting broccoli that survived the winter’s hard freeze and added them too the pan with a fat, winter leek. Dinner was shockingly green after so many months of brown. There’s a jar of daffodils and hyacinths on the table next to me. The buds on the little pear tree out back are full to bursting. Every night now I fall asleep to frog song and wake to birds.
The weekly Saturday market starts up next weekend and the Spring Bread Subscription the Wednesday after. I’m still plugging away at my retail bakery plans. While I wait for contractor estimates I’ve been working on the floor plans and financing. The former is coming along nicely; the latter is nail biting (so much debt!) but I’m starting to wrap my head around it. And so, with the days lengthening and filling with work and projects and new growth, I’m settling into spring. I hope your days, too, are blooming. Sophie Owner | Baker |