Quarrystone

by Susan Weber

My dad loved baking bread. Engineer by training, he took the discipline to heart. Once a month he monopolized Mom’s double ovens in his quest for nine perfect loaves, stretchy and airy on the inside with crispy, flour-dusted crust. He was as careful in the kitchen as he was in the lab at work. Thermometers, utensils, timers—all employed to monitor the batch. He tweaked proportions of flour, yeast, water, and salt. He tried out different rising times and baking procedures. I’d go with him to the mill for fifty pound bags of high gluten flour. Yeast came in jars, not those little quick rise packets. There was nothing pre-packaged about Dad’s art.

If you happened to be around when he was taking a loaf out of the oven, you were sat down at table with a chunk of steaming bread, a slab of butter, and the required jar of honey. No sentient human could deny it was the taste of paradise on a plate.

When Mom died, his grief mixed bread baking with all the other things he couldn’t do without her. But then, a bakery opened down the street from me. The first time I cut Dad a piece of crusty Pugliese bread, he slathered it with butter and honey and took a big bite. I waited for the engineer’s report. “This is good!” he said, reaching for his second piece.

Years after my father died, a young civil engineer from Italy’s Pugliese region entered our lives. She came as a partner to our son. In Pugliese, the culinary mainstay is local fish, pasta, wine, olive oil, and vegetables, with bread plucked daily from the baker’s hand. It was my husband who offered her the namesake bread. Would Ohio’s Pugliese pass muster? She squinted as she chewed deliberately. “It has the right crust!” she said, and took another bite.

I’m in Italy now, thinking of those times and honoring my own lost love, partner of a thousand years and yesterday. He never made it to the Adriatic, but his spirit flies above us in the form of a curious gull. We’ve come to the sea, Pugliese daughter and father, Ohio son and mother. We stake our claim like a bucket brigade handing folding chairs, umbrellas, and towels down giant steps carved into an old quarry. Pitted stone hurts our feet. Sunlight is glinting off the liminal sea.

More family groups populate the cove. Salt water beckons us to swim. On my way across the shallows I go down hard. My hand bangs against the jagged rock. Crab-walking graceless to the edge, I join the other swimmers.

Eventually hunger and fatigue draw me back to the shore. I tread water to consider my approach. Our young Pugliesan glides across the rocks like Neptune’s child. She’s spoken with her father and they’ve diagnosed my problem. I need to commit to one step before I take the next, she says, bear down on the rock to get traction. When you grow up around here, you learn to accept some pain on the bottom of your foot in exchange for locomotion.

With father and daughter looking on, and in no rush to smash my palm again, I follow their advice. One step. Press down. Another. Belong here. Soles are stronger than I thought. I cross the shallows grounded and erect.

Maybe every journey is a search for secret skills. Uncertainty alerts all the senses. To temperature, to timing, to ingredients. To language, to custom, to gesture. To difference, to self, to life blood pounding in our ears. Taste buds, scent receptors, fingertips, foot pads reaching for the crusty extravagance of life. When all has been said and done—as though that were possible—we might as well be dead. But we’re here, beautifully erect, with gifts to give each other. For mutual survival. For courage to plant our toes. For humility and humanity. For confidence, brimmed with joy.

Photo Susan Weber CC BY-SA 4.0