Double the recipe, double the luck!

I received an acceptance from Mid River's Review on two of my poems. I'm jumping for joy and if I had some yeast dough rising, I'd be kneading it about now. But I had a bad experience baking bread once. My husband doesn't understand why I don't want a bread machine. Let me tell you...

In the fall of 1969 I was a young military wife living in a remote Alaska town trying to survive on a shoe string budget. A loaf of bread at that time cost $1.59, back when in the lower 48 you could buy five loaves for a buck. One day towards the end of the month when we were as broke as a our ramschakle trailer, my next door neighbor, Sheila and I pooled our pennies and walked to the general store to purchase a double packet of dry yeast. She wanted to show me how to bake homemade bread. We salivated at the thought of warm bread oozing with butter. We combined the contents of our nearly empty flour canisters and decided to double the yeast so we'd have a double loaf, one for her and one for me.

We took turns kneading the mass of moist dough. We played a game of Yahtzee and watched the dough rise to perfection, then we pounded it a second time. We covered it with a damp towel to rise again, and then we took the shortcut and trekked single file through the woods where the buffalo and moose roamed. We visited other army wives living nearby. Three hours later we remembered the bread dough. We hurried home, confident that we had enough time to bake the bread and surprise our husbands. The surprise was on us!

We darted into the tiny trailer kitchen and gasped in disbelief. The MASSIVE DOUGH had swollen to incredible proportion, crept out of the bowl onto the table and was slinking towards the edge. Speechless, we looked at one another and then back at the sticky blob covered with two yellow ducky diaper pins, the empty yeast packet, three pennies, one nickel, copper bobby pins from my friend's red hair and the contents of her husband's ashtray. When we saw three of our red Yahtzee dice embedded in the blob we laughed uncontrollably.

We buried the mass of massive dough in the bottom of the trash barrel. Back then the landlord burned the trash on the weekend. Sheila and I worried that it would rise to great heights when the match was tossed. We didn't wait around to see.

Homemade bread? No thank you, unless YOU are baking.