Dear—
This morning I cried over sourdough.
Well, not sourdough exactly. But the smooth white slightly-waxy bag it came in, stamped with LMNOP Bakery in faded Baskerville letters on the front. I’d gone—curbside pickup style—to Fable Farms, for sweet corn and dark cherries and little deep yellow squashes that look like tiny flying saucers. I’d gone for olive oil, rosemary infused, which they ended up not having, so I went away with plain olive oil.
The words plain and olive oil really don’t belong in the same sentence. Olive oil itself is infused with tenacious fruiting from tenacious trees, harvested with attentiveness and, sometimes, crushed with stone that is generations old. I love olive oil almost enough to cry at the taste of it.
Eating sourdough with olive oil, especially LMNOP Bakery’s sourdough, could revive you from a life of flatness where you feel like that smooth white bag that brought me to tears just an hour ago. I had asked for two loaves this time, knowing what I was happily in for, and I had gotten the pair. Thankfully they were not out of it.
At the moment, I am drinking Buddha’s blend tea, infused with mullein I’d let grow in my driveway. I have not really gone anywhere since March, so my driveway thinks it is not a driveway anymore, but perhaps rather a garden for wild things. In fact, the other day I heard the woman next door, the one who always wears some variation of tiara in her hair, even large tiaras that look like they belong on a bride…I heard her walking by with her little blond son, and she said to him in a conspiratorial tone, “This is where the wild things grow.”
I was almost sad to harvest the mullein, but my tea and my body needed it. Mullein is good for bronchial suffering.
When 2020 began, full of hope, I did not know I would need mullein more than once. In March, when I suffered what may or may not have been The Virus that flattens us to the floor, I had none, because I’d neglected to harvest it last summer, thinking it just a weed that made my property look vaguely Southwestern, with its rosette softness that reminds me of the patterns of succulents and the single, tall, very tall cylinder of lemon flowers it eventually reaches to the sky in a way that says this is all I’ve got, in a hard parched place, but I’m making it reach and blossom in any case.
On Friday, I saw someone’s wish on Instagram. She was feeling flattened, all insular and empty, and wanting that feeling to fold itself over into something more like inspiration. This caused me to ponder.
I will not recount to you my losses since the beginning of this year. You’ve had enough of thinking about the suffering of the world. Plus, you’ve had your own. This is part of why you (and I) feel flattened.
When I think of flatness, I think of the two dimensions of A Wrinkle in Time, in which, at one point they accidentally get propelled to a place where they cannot expand, not even a little. It’s painful. Only a fast escape, a shift in magic to a different dimension, allows them to once again breathe, to feel whole and full and rounded with life, though their dark journey is not nearly over.
After I folded the LMNOP Bakery bag into a perfect rectangle I could hold and easily smooth between my hands, I remembered the workshop I’ve picked up and put down creating for the last six years. Day 1 is about breathing and holding. I decided to try it myself, not for the purpose of writing anything, but simply to try it, and because I wasn’t ready to discard the sourdough paper bag.
This was when it happened.
I closed my eyes and took in the fragrance of fresh-bakedness. I ran my fingers over the paper and felt its crinkles here and there. I heard the sound of softness, rustling. And my grandmother came to mind. Her land, ten acres of corn and dark cherries and flowers growing wild. No olive trees, but there were mulberries. And there was tenacity. And the attentiveness of love. The humid air, the way I could almost taste the paper of the patterns she cut with care and pinned and fashioned into dresses for her and for me.
It has been a long time since I’ve written to you here. I noted that the last entry was in the season of wineberries, which I now see was in July, from a year that feels like it was surely seated in another world, though it was only twelve months ago, right here on Earth, and on this very porch where I am yet again sitting with my feet resting against the dark brown Adirondack chair. I was drinking jasmine tea. Today, it’s peach-fragrant white and green.
Sometimes, Dear–, it takes many months to unfold, to find, again, our fullness. But sometimes, if we close our eyes and breathe, and hold, it takes just a moment for the taste of paper to tesser us to memory. And that opens us back up to reaching with our words.
So that is what I wish for you today. The taste of paper. Or dark cherries. Or sweet corn. The startling moment when something old unfolds—into something newly-born.
As always,
L.L.