A tribute to my mother, Lily.
By Gerry Godley
Hello all,
It gives me enormous pride to have writers like Gerry contribute to the Digest. This piece is a deeply moving tribute to the passing of his gorgeous mother, Lily. While emersed in his words, we are instantly made to reflect on our own relationships with family, appreciating the very beauty and fragility of life. Of course, where there is Gerry, there is indeed bread. And where there is bread, there is life.
Love,
Cúán.
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While the dough is proving, life continues
It was early on the morning of the national holiday last March. It fell on a Friday, the day I excuse myself from the world and its distractions for the baker’s hermetic regime, submitting to the long hours required to produce the goods for my customers come Saturday morning.
The night before I had mixed the levain, and now it was at its peak activity, young and vigorous. I could see this in the volume it had acquired overnight, gaseous activity issuing forth like a thermal spring. I could smell its tangy lactic bouquet, notes of orchard fruits. Judging the levain’s colony of wild yeasts and bacteria to be at their optimal, I’m poised to add it to sixty kilos of flour in various configurations which had themselves received their water just an hour ago, a process used by sourdough bakers called autolyse which opens up the grain to the fermentation to come. If I want good bread tomorrow, this is a decisive moment. Wait too long and the bacteria will overwhelm the yeasts, and my loaves will be overly acidic. I should add it now, knowing that will trigger a set of enzymatic reactions that, like death and taxes, cannot be stopped. Once incorporated the levain will voraciously consume the food I have offered it, fulfilling its destiny to convert flour, water and salt into the living thing that is dough, and for the next six hours, I will be attending to it with my hands. Stretching, folding, shaping, coaxing it on its last journey toward bread. A point of no return.
I'm absorbed in these microbial concerns when the phone rings, one of my sisters. It’s not unexpected. My mother, at whose bedside we six siblings have been attending, has for ten days been on her home stretch, and now she too is at the point of no return. I throw on clothes, throw the levain and the hydrating doughs into fridges, jump in a taxi, and ask him to hurry. Despite Suleyman’s best efforts, it still takes an hour to reach the nursing home deep in the southside, with majestic views of the Bay from the high needs ward on the top floor, lukewarm tea and value range digestives from a trolley. My sister’s expression conveys the worst. I am too late.