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,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 I left the kitchen just after seven last Monday. Riding towards home I caught slices of a sky melted apricot yellow between the buildings. The color was luminous and deep. I changed course, rode hard towards Squalicum, hoping to catch the color, hoping as the desire knotted under my collar bone and tightened my throat. I was too slow. By the time I stopped above the beach the sunset had settled into a lovely, unsurprising orange. I stayed anyways, leaning against my bike, watching the sunset and the crescent moon, watching the silhouettes of herons flying north and the colors reflected in the glassy bay, till a jetski revving loops across the bright water and the brittle music playing from a cell phone down the beach drove me away. I would be earlier next time, I decided. I would go down to the water to watch the sunset every day the sky was clear. But I didn’t. I worked late all week. I rode home in the dark. Celina will be working the market today, but I might see you when I stop by to shop. 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 Shortbread Buckwheat Crisps FALL BREAD SUBSCRIPTION 11 weeks remaining Every Wednesday, OCT 2 - DEC 18 Pickup downtown, Birchwood, Fairhaven This week: Mountain Rye, Red & White, Farmer Rye 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    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 All along the top dock lines ran from the railing down to colorful floats, disappearing into the opaque water. The sky was scudded with clouds and hazy, so that the blue water and the blue sky and the blue islands were soft and dreamy like a watercolor painting. Bicycles passed, weaving between pedestrians. Families strolled by with children and small dogs, laughing in Spanish too quick for me to understand. A man rowed up in a tiny wooden dingy with a giant poodle riding the prow and the two of them followed the laughing families up and away. Children climbed onto the high railing, posing till parents or passersby took notice, before flinging their bodies out between the floats. The dock was cheerful and alive in the golden light of evening. A man walked up from the floating dock holding a fish by the gills, trailed by a round little girl in a startlingly hot pink bikini. I didn’t understand what he held till he dropped the dogfish onto the dock. It fought the concrete, trying to swim the air, gasping. The child crouched beside it, poking the shark back onto its bloody belly when it rolled. The man stood over her, arms crossed, while other men walked over to admire the catch and take pictures with their cell phones. “Will you eat it?” someone asked, curious and slightly appalled. “No,” the little girl answered, laughing, "of course not." When the shark finally stilled the man toed it straight and walked back to his line. My friend and I watched this small, casual violence from the same bench where we had sat, sunning dry after a swim, talking about small things and watching the clouds and the families and the man rowing his poodle across the bay. We tried to turn away. We tried to turn back to our conversation. But in the end we looked on in silence. When the man left, we stood and picked up our shoes. The round little girl in her hot pink bikini was still crouched by the dead shark when we walked away. 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 All Berry Slab Pie Wednesday bread this week: Red & White, Mountain Rye, Baker's Choice: TOASTED SESAME Sign up for the LATE SUMMER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION Every Wednesday, August 7 - September 25  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  “Why do you bike?” she asked me. The question shouldn’t have taken me by surprise, but it did. “Because I like to,” I replied, reaching out for more words and coming back empty-handed. The conversation moved on. As answers go, it was true enough, but thoroughly inadequate. Never mind noise and air pollution, never mind the costs of transit infrastructure and public health, never mind livable cities and public safety, never mind geopolitics and oil. Those are all good stories, true stories. I could have told any of them. Or I could have finished the story I’d begun, had I not gone mind-empty and tongue-tied. Here is the story: I like to bicycle. I like having half an hour inside the world and its weather, with the wind and sunshine and the driving rain against my face, with the sky opening above me and the smells of the city—woodsmoke, the chemical choke of fabric softener from a dryer vent, petrichor, cut grass, the bloom of night flowers, the secret wilderness of water and forest under the Dupont bridge—blowing by, even if I spend the rest of the day shut up inside a wood and concrete box. And I like the mechanical efficiency of cycling: the way muscle translates so effortlessly into speed. I like the freedom a bicycle’s speed and size gives me to explore off the city’s arteries and into the winding capillaries of the neighborhoods, with an eye out for pocket parks and abandoned fruit trees. I like the rush of descent, crouched low, waiting, waiting, waiting, faster, and braking just in time for the intersection. I like bicycling as a small, daily act of thanksgiving: for a body that is strong and capable, for the day, for the city, for the minutes between one task and another, when all I need to do is pedal and breath and watch out for homicidal drivers. 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: SPICED RING RYE!   Sixty degrees and overcast: now this is proper Northwestern summer weather. The hot, clear days through April and May and early June were lovely, but felt foreign and vaguely ominous. When I was a child, it rained through the 4th of July. A hyperbole of memory, I'm sure, but how many parades did we shiver through during those island summers, watching the old cars and the floats roll past and scrambling for the saltwater taffy the riders tossed into the thin crowd? TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Herb & Olive Oil Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot Seedy Buckwheat Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Oat Scone Shortbread Strawberry Rhubarb Slab Pie Sign up for the Summer Bread Subscription through July 31 RED & WHITE Subscription $49 MOUNTAIN RYE Subscription $49 BAKER's CHOICE Subscription $56 Wednesday bread this week: Red & White, Mountain Rye, Baker's Choice: FARMER RYE (a crackled rye boule with wheat, buckwheat, and corn!)  (accidentally candid self portrait on the loading dock because I lost track of the camera timer) After long hours cocooned in the fluorescent, time-warping glare of the commissary I stepped out onto the loading dock and woke up for the first time all day. There, for a few minutes, I had the low sun heating my back and the breeze against my skin. I had the sounds of traffic and sea gulls and the busker on the corner. Beneath the breeze I could smell the alley: sewer and garbage and the restaurant a few doors down. And suddenly I was close to tears, the grief caught in my throat as I held my breath against the pressure in my eyes. The whole day gone and I had missed it. A small grief, this lost day, but I stood with it for a moment longer, remembering to breath, remembering the feel and sight and taste of the outside, remembering the sun and the world turning, before I went back in to work. 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 Oat Scone Shortbread Strawberry Rhubarb Slab Pie! (though I don't know how this will hold up in pastry bags. BYO bowl and fork, perhaps?) Sign up for the Summer Bread Subscription through July 31 RED & WHITE Subscription $49 MOUNTAIN RYE Subscription $49 BAKER's CHOICE Subscription $56 Wednesday bread this week: Red & White, Mountain Rye, Baker's Choice: Polenta |
