Hi neighbors and far flung old friends,July subscriptions just floated into the shop, feel free to grab one early if you like to. If not, don’t worry, you can still visit us for extras and take your chances!
We’re sailing into June and despite the painful heat, I do still love being a bread baker. I realize now after many years that I need a shirt change and an ice cold shower as soon as the ovens are off, an afternoon cucumber lime aguas fresca, and perhaps a stiff drink in the evening to get me through it. Luckily for me, this dusty town provides for me, while I’m centrally located in the mecca of taco and food trucks just waiting to push out the window a monstrous plastic cup filled with all the cooling cucumber lime nectar I could want, and a 5 block evening walk down to intermission to deliver focaccia and for the best old fashioned in town and all the salty buttered popcorn I can eat, until my oldest kiddo gets off work at the theater and decides it’s time for a starlit walk back to the taco trucks for a spicy late night dinner.
Should anyone live so hedonistically with the crumpled dollar bills from selling baguettes pulled straight from the fires of Modesto’s mount doom? I can’t say, but I’d love to kick off my boots and lay down my aching back at night thinking I earned it all (and hopefully enough more to defeat my own hulking monster, the gorgon that is our summertime power bill).
But summer is for hedonism, after all. The days stretch so long, that after I’ve scrubbed dough off my arms and all the bakery dishes, the hammock under the sycamore calls me for at 3:30 p.m. reading session, munching through a nectarine. I listen to the leaves rustle in the breeze, I watch the cloudless sky as two red tailed hawks circle lightly and then plunge down into dry creek beyond, my cat crouton leaps onboard and purrs happily on my chest, rubbing her whiskers against my estate sale dollar Steinbeck paperback. 5 chapters turns into an “accidental” nap, drifting in the drowsy thoughts of imagined worlds and stories. I’m currently reading “To a God Unknown”. Steinbeck’s mystical 1933 parable about settling in the fertile valleys of California.