Massive mass

Ten years ago, after suffering like the rest of Americans with the horrific images and realities of the attack on 9/11, I couldn't take it anymore. My nerves were raw; I was on the verge of tears for two weeks. I was tired of crying.

I sent this to an editor:

I have shed so many tears and suffered so much sorrow. Like most Americans I am looking for a reason to smile or laugh. If you think my experience would help lift someone's mood, you have my permission to print. It went to print in the next issue, and I think I received $35. Tomorrow, I will tell you where I was and what I did on 9/11.


Baking Bread in Alaska… published Suburban Journal, 9/01

In the fall of 1969 I was a military wife living in a remote Alaska town trying to survive on a shoestring budget. A loaf of bread cost $1.50, while in the lower 48 you could buy four loaves of white bread for a buck.

One day my next door neighbor, Sheila, and I pooled our pennies and walked to the general store in town to purchase a double packet of dry yeast. She wanted to show me how to make homemade bread. We combined the contents of our nearly empty flour canisters and doubled the yeast so we would have a loaf for her and loaf for me. We took turns kneading the mass of dough. We watched it rise and then we pounded it a second time. We covered it with a moist towel to rise again, and then we trekked single file down a footpath through the woods to visit other army wives.

Three hours later we remembered our bread dough. We hurried home, confident that there was still enough time to divide that mass of dough, pop it into the oven and surprise our husbands. The surprise was on us. We darted into the tiny trailer kitchen and gasped in disbelief at that massive dough. It had swollen to incredible proportion, crept out of the bowl, onto Sheila's table and was slinking toward the edge. Speechless, we looked at one another in disbelief, then back at the sticky blob covered with ducky diaper pins, the empty yeast packet, two pennies, one nickel, two copper bobby pins to match my friend’s hair, the contents of an ashtray and three, red Yahtzee die. We laughed uncontrollably.

We gave the blob a fitting burial in the bottom of the community trash barrel. There was no trash removal and residents burned trash on the weekend. Sheila and I worried for days that the massive dough would rise to great heights when the landlord tossed the match.

Homemade bread? No thank you, unless you're baking.