I wish there were more hours in the day, but there aren’t. Sometimes we have to make hard choices about what we do with our hours and minutes: I can do this or I can do that, but I don’t have time for both.
The latest issue of Pipe Wrench magazine has been out for several days now and I want to read it. The fungible time I have in my schedule is my morning writing hour, and today I choose to use that to curl up with a cat and a blanket and read instead.
I was restless and excited yesterday in anticipation of the coming storm. We had hot cocoa in the pantry and firewood in the hamper, and I wanted to lean fully into cozy. I wanted to bake, and I wanted to bake bread. Specifically, I wanted to bake oat bread.
My first appliance as a grown-up was a bread machine. I still remember the whir and thump of the paddle on the knead cycle. The sound filled the house and promised good things to come. That was probably 25 years ago. I made bread in that thing constantly. The house would smell warm and yeasty while the dough rose, then golden and tantalizing while it baked. We’d stand around waiting for it to finish so we could thunk it out of the pan, slice it, and slather it in butter and honey.
On my first Mothers Day as a mom, my mom graduated me to making bread without a machine. She gave me the 25th Anniversary edition of the Tassajara Bread Book with the inscription, “I learned how to bake bread using the original edition of this book.”
It’s been a while since I’ve baked bread. Maybe years. I bake dinner rolls for the kids on Thanksgiving and Christmas, and cinnamon rolls on Christmas, if that counts as bread, but I can’t remember the last time I baked loaves of bread. In recent years that I did bake bread, I had learned more about how bread works, and was baking from more precise recipes and techniques in Peter Reinhart’s Bread Baker’s Apprentice, Crust and Crumb, and Whole Grain Breads. He knows bread. His methods, which include starting the dough the night before, work.
But yesterday, I didn’t want to start on Saturday and finish on Sunday. I wanted oat bread, and I wanted it the same day. I also didn’t want fussy and precise. I wanted the loosey goosey hippie freedom of the Tassajara Bread Book.
Bread-baking from this book yesterday gave me exactly what I wanted. There was no stress, no wondering, “Am I doing this right?” I glanced at the kneading and shaping diagrams to remind myself how to do them. I didn’t care about the perfect crust or the perfect crumb, whether I stopped kneading at the right time, whether my loaves would come out fine-tuned and perfect.
I got to smell the dough, and get my hands in it, and punch it. I got to feel the smooth worn cover of my book. I thumbed through the pages while the dough rose. I found my old notes, spatters of cinnamon and oil and butter, recipe adjustments, Grandma Janet’s recipe for multigrain bread penciled in the back end paper, my mom’s inscription in the front. I delighted in the warm zen of the author, and little poems scattered throughout:
Rock and water
wind and tree
bread dough risingVastly all
Edward Espe Brown, the Tassajara Bread Book
are patient with me.
And at the end, after a few hours of mostly resting the dough, we had golden brown oat bread. This morning, I cut a slice off the loaf. I spread butter across it, then drizzled honey over it, and I watched the snow come down.
I sit by the window this morning with a fuzzy fleece blanket over my lap, a cat snuggled against my legs, and a warm cup of coffee in the sill. I can feel cold radiate from the window glass. The sky is a dusky pink as the sun rises, and the naked branches of deciduous trees stand out in black against the blush.
Though most of the trees are bare now, a few final holdouts stand tall, fully clothed in burnt orange leaves. Silver-white frost furs the grass and the brown stems of my sleeping garden. The tassles of the miscanthus grass finger the air like frothy golden hands.
Outside is stillness except for the echoing honk of a Canada goose. People are indoors; all the cars in sight are covered in frost. The morning may seem like an emptiness waiting to be filled. But to me it is perfect in its quiet accumulation of ice particles, autumn colors, and pink light. In its emptiness, it is already full.
I really do love my new office setup. I sat at my desk working today and heard an alarming CLANK from the window sill. Our cat’s tail had whacked the ceramic salad plate that holds one of my plants. I peeked over my computer monitor — since my desk now faces the window — to see what was going on. Tootsie was crouched in the sill, tail swishing, haunches quivering, watching leaves scuttle across the ground through the open window.
From my desk, I looked to the other window that’s just outside my office door to see our other cat, Tubbles, swishing her tail, her body alert and in the exact same crouch as Tootsie’s, watching leaves in the breeze.
They (the cats) trembled with excitement. I don’t know what it is about leaves. They go wild for them. In the fall, when the oak leaves are coppery and dry, and they land with their little leaf feet and then walk and skitter across the porch or gravel when the breeze pushes them, the cats just want to burst. I had to move my plants out of the window sill so Tootsie wouldn’t knock our nice salad plate on the floor. She kept jittering forward, then she’d back off, then she’d chitter in her little cat chirp and scoot forward again til her nose was against the screen.
I’ve been trying to notice delights every day, and watching our cats watch leaves was definitely a delight for today.
I dragged a kitchen chair into our closet yesterday so I could reach the storage bins on the shelf. Even though it’s been warm the past week and will continue to be warm for the next few days, I’m tired of my summer clothes and wanted to see what fun stuff I might have packed away for cooler weather.
The cats sniffed around as I opened one bin then sat on top of the other to observe. The first bin had thick fisherman sweaters and deep winter tunics. Those won’t be useful for a while. Beneath those were a few lighter weight sweaters that will be good for fall. From the second bin, I pulled out corduroys, a couple of sweater dresses, a lightweight turtleneck dress.
As I laid the bulky clothes out on my bed, I realized I needed to find a place to put them. I opened the dresser to study what was in there. I eyed my closet to see what I won’t wear again now that the highest temperature in the foreseeable forecast is 80℉ (27℃).
The kitchen chair is back at the table, pushed neatly in. In the closet now, on a shelf I cannot reach, are my board shorts and sundresses. Close at hand in the dresser, I’ve got warm comfies for fall and winter.
I need the cold weather to begin so we can just get this over with.
The town pickup for fall yard waste is a week from Monday, and I’ve got a lot of clipping to do. I spent all day Sunday cutting back the brown Shasta daisy stems, yellowing lemon balm, broken Tithonia that fell over in recent rain, and about half of the blackened echinacea stems. I couldn’t bear to cut the echinacea all back — just this morning, goldfinches swayed on their crispy cones — so I left some at the back of the bed. But they’re really terribly ugly, and we only have so much room for composting; I had to cut some of them for the town to take away. My yard waste from today lines about 20 feet of our curb. Unless I get a chipper, I don’t have space to compost all the vegetation from the annuals and perennials in my garden.
I dug up a bunch of stuff I decided I don’t like anymore, like the wormwood that gets shaggy by the end of summer and that’s just not that interesting to me, and the lambs ears that grew so aggressively, they killed off some of my favorite plants. I dug out some lemon balm, too, to thin it. And I pulled out the tomatoes and their supports.
Mostly it just felt good to be out in the garden again. It hasn’t required much of me this summer, which is good, because I was off paddling and doing other fun things, and I didn’t have much to give. I enjoyed being among my plants again. Roses scented the air while I weeded their bed, and when I sheared the lavender and the lemon balm, the mint and the rosemary, I got to smell all their herby fragrances. Butterflies still float and flutter. At any given time, there would be three or four monarchs on the Zinnias and Tithonia. We still have one more chrysalis (that I know of) that we’re waiting for to release its butterfly.
After I cleaned up a bit, I took my camera out for some October garden shots.
Butterfly Mind 