Give Us This Day

Tuesday 11-22-11
Our daily bread...or at least the memories of it

Thanksgiving is bringing with it some mixed feelings and anxiety this year, for obvious reasons since I am doing the whole medically supervised weight loss.  It is, for many people, and historically for my family, the biggest food holiday of the year.  Compounding my nervousness is the fact that my brother is the only person in my family who knows that I am preparing for weight loss surgery, and he most likely won't be with us.  So my holiday will be spent working my normal shift at my job and then rushing to the family gathering place for Thanksgiving supper.

Thank God for The Hubs!  He will be with me to help me deal with any strangeness that could possibly ensue if anyone notices my altered eating and drinking habits.  I am encouraged by the fact that I had lunch with a friend today and never touched the rolls that immediately landed on our table.  (They materialized out of nowhere, as though Scotty from Star Trek just beamed them over!)  Of course, the friend I was with today knows all about my weight loss process and completely supports me.  But still, it was an accomplishment for me not even to touch the bread. 

I am a Southern Diva to the core, and we Southern girls love us some bread.  The scents, textures and rich flavors of the many kinds of breads we adore are the stuff fat girl dreams are made of.  (Forgive me if the following descriptions and recollections border on the pornographic, I may not be able to help myself.)  Some of my sweetest, albeit most carb-laden, memories are surrounded by the wafting aroma of bread...and some sad memories as well.

Mama mixed a few simple ingredients into a cast iron skillet and made a miracle every day at lunchtime for my Granny.  Some corn meal, a splash of buttermilk, a little blob of bacon grease and some water, stirred with love and baked in a tiny little skillet turned into the best cornbread I have ever tasted in my life.  No one else's "bread" (as Granny always called it) ever tasted as good, and I certainly never mastered this art form.  I need to get the bread skillet from Dad's house before it gets gone.

Mamaw would make biscuits to eat with supper when Dad would take us to her and Papaw's house, usually on Sunday nights.  There would always be a little dab of dough left over, too small to make another biscuit from but too big to waste. Mamaw, with her mischievous sense of humor, would fashion this remnant into a snake, sometimes with cinnamon sprinkled on top.

My Aunt Ruby made biscuits every day, from scratch, for over 4 decades, and when I was a kid/young adult, there were always leftover breakfast biscuits on her stove, slightly blackened on the bottom from the pan she baked them in and at least 2 inches tall at their golden-brown tops. Her husband, one of my 2 Uncle Johns, showed me how delicious those biscuits were with maple syrup on them along with the butter.

Holiday meals with my Mom and Pop-in-Law were usually crowded, hectic and filled with all kinds of delicious treats, including Mom-in-Law's homemade pies.  They were legendary in our family.  She could put together an incredible, nutritious and festive meal for a lot of people with efficiency and grace...and she was notorious for burning the rolls!  Not crackly-crunch burned, just a little more toasty than she would have liked. 

Mama died in the wee hours of the morning on December 8, 1997.  We had spent what seemed like endless weeks there at the hospital with her as she declined, rallied and declined again.  That last long day that I spent with her was grey and dreary, and the atmosphere inside the four walls of her room felt as chilly as the winter day outside.  After she died and I left the hospital for the last time, I made the long walk once more  from her room out to the parking garage, a walk I had made so many times I could almost count the ceiling tiles from one end of the trek to the other.  Emerging into the cold night air, my awareness of everything around me seemed heightened, and my nostrils were filled with the warm, buttery aroma of bread being made at the bakery down the street.

So many of my memories involve food, and bread in particular.  It isn't even the bread I miss so much (although I do miss it) as much as the hands who sifted and mixed, kneaded and rolled, and the hearts who baked love into every bite of warm, nourishing, sustaining bread I enjoyed growing up.  I am thankful to God for all the bakers who fed me, not just my body, but my soul.