“The give and take of it all, my muddled pride.”— Jessica Gigot in her poem, “Amends.”
The highest and best use of my time is not baking. I did a lot of it the past two days. But, as we all know, or at least I do, the quickest way to a better mood is to spend a ridiculous amount of time and make a huge mess doing something that most people I know can do with their eyes closed, like bake cookies and muffins. It’s humbling, which is funny, after you cry.
I can make a few things well, I have five children, so I had to bake birthday cakes –North Douglas Chocolate Cake is the one for all– then there’s my grandmother’s Christmas sour cream coffee cake (once a year but I make a lot of them, more on that soon), cornbread, Tenakee blueberry crisp and brownies (blonde and chocolate)—does whipping cream count? I do make nice whipped cream.
Which is why I’m proud of my sourdough bread which turns out every time. My daughter taught me how for Mother’s Day this year, and now I bake it so often that I don’t need the recipe.
I love the Great British Baking Show, although I don’t know precisely what a sponge cake is or why there is more than one way to bake one. I binge watch it on airplanes when I’m afraid I’ll die. It is soothing, and since I’m not a baker, I am easily impressed. There’s that, and the contestants are so nice and so normal, and so multicultural, non-binary and binary, and so very British— polite, not boastful, capable, well spoken, civil, kind — jolly even. I love that world. The tent creates a community each season.
My happiness is directly related to community. It’s a big part of why I go to church, swim at the public pool, am on the library board and a hospice volunteer, attend Kooeex in Klukwan and do a radio show on KHNS. It’s why I write to you. It’s why I said I’d bake for the Friends of the Library holiday cookies by the pound fundraiser and why I said yes to an invitation to an Orthodox St. Lucia Day family service (meaning it was in their living room), this morning.
The emphasis was on light and joy, I think, and there was a lot of both with a clutch of young children and a baby—a little parade of girls in St. Lucia candle crowns ( paper, not real flames) and boys sporting tall white paper-cone hats with stars on them—but that came after the forty, or maybe eighty– or it could have been more–Lord Have Mercys. The parents sang most of the repetative hour-long ancient Christian liturgy in two-part harmony, soprano and bass. It was so beautiful, and they were so good, that even the children were sort of still. I stood with eyes closed and felt the wonder of it warm me. What a lovely surprise, and the muffins I baked for afterwards all got eaten.
The jam thumbprints for the bake sale turned out pretty good, too. They should have, since they took two days to make, but there were only 19 of them. The recipe said it made 42. Sure, 42 mice cookies. (I bought a couple back in my pound of cookies box.)
It’s fitting that this week we light a candle for joy. Lord Have Mercy, the world can use it and I can too. Candles also give off heat, and with earth as hard as iron, I’ll take what I can get.
Here is a poem that has nothing to do with baking, or Christmas or even winter. It’s about broccoli—but it is connected — by sharing how good it feels to create something—music, cookies, children, vegetables. Your own high-pressure system. A family. Community. It’s by my friend Jessica Gigot, whose small Skagit Valley farm is flooding. Lord Have Mercy.
Jessica’s books include A Little Bit of Land, about how she became a farmer, and the poetry collections Feeding Hour and Flood Patterns.
