We go back to the beginning

Early April and cold rain falling, chilly enough in our house that I still have to bring my starter into the living room where the wood stove is pulsing its heat, the most basic slurry of wheat and water dancing an evolutionary chemical dance with wild yeasts as we go back to the beginning and start again. Wheat and rye both beckon still in the raw spring air, and this lump of life I pulled from the fridge after dinner last night will today be split into bowls and for the next few days the bubble and slush of a growing starter reminds me that the very space we inhabit, the air we breathe is a biome of its own with dust and disease and fungi and bacteria and small bits of life we knew nothing about in previous centuries but had, through luck and practice and observation and long told stories that documented the hows and whys, developed scientific thinking through what we even today call superstitions or mumbo jumbo that contained embedded collective wisdom passed on across generations and today we may not think it necessary to drag clean linen over dew beneath an apple tree, and squeeze that moisture onto the wet flour mix, but they knew how to start a starter, and with all our advances in knowledge and science we almost ignored the old ways to make bread or preserve cabbages, ferment milk or brew our beer, and thirty years ago it looked almost as though our doom had been pronounced and we in these United States would be relegated to eating factory food and dead nutrition but in pockets around the country and globe, in small towns and crowded cities, still there were a few who continued to say yes to the old ways of teasing yeasts from the air or the skin of an apple from a long abandoned tree, a remnant of last century’s orchards now neglected and half dead, mostly overgrown, part of a hedgerow or just forgotten down in a gully, its unpruned branches a jumble of angles, and now a new generation has relearned many of the traditions of their grandparents and great grandparents and it’s not just cideries and bakeries that are doing this but you and I, who bake and press apples and say yes again to the possibilities of simple wild-yeast fermented food, the nutritional, caloric foundation of life in much of the world for millennia, and every time we knead a mass of dough or pull an umbered loaf from a hot oven and listen to its skin crackle as it cools, waiting, waiting just long enough to pull it apart and taste the transformation and spread it with butter and honey or wait a few days and grill it with cheese in an olive oiled pan, even though it’s just a weekday lunch or a snack before bed, the bread, beginning with its tug on our jaw, the edge of char almost realized, heating a mass of dough until it dries just as it pushes and prepares to burst, we bow to the ordinary, and every time we sit together and pass the peas and sop up the gravy with a hearty crust we’re in the midst of it all, and a deep love of the daily, which in these days of sheltering, working from home, and re-imagining family life, this return to the beginning, starting with the most basic forms of life – yeast – means we can begin to meditate on what tomorrow could look like, when the rain stops falling.