Grace, at dVerse, challenges us to write a poem about bread, whether real or as a metaphor for something equally important and delectable. I offer you my paean to a simple substance that has sustained humans for many delicious years.
In a world of carb-avoiders and bread-deniers, I remain staunchly one who, when a loaf or roll is ready for the knife, cannot contain myself until the topping (butter, jam, honey) is ready before diving in to that first glorious bite! Sometimes I crave bread the way an addict craves drugs, needing it, dreaming of it, salivating for it. No sugarplums dance through my head but crusty loaves, the aroma surpassing that of the costliest perfume. Years ago, when our girls were young, we bought a bread machine, that first loaf, by my husband’s reckoning, a costly one at $250 plus ingredients, the next, half that price. And so it halved until a crusty French bread, not taken out and shaped to a baguette but tasting just the same, simple water, flour, salt, sugar, and yeast turned into edible paradise, tallied a mere twenty cents or so. Ingredients placed into the machine the night before, we wakened to that blissful scent for months, until that dark day when our senses (now accustomed to the smell) no longer registered its fragrance and we were left, beggered, with mere taste.
This, that and the other thing 