My parents started out with a small house. At the time it made sense. Then the children came. First two adopted daughters, then another born to them, followed by two boys and finally two more were adopted. As the family grew, so did the house. The crawl space was dug out and concrete poured to make a basement. One side of the roof was raised to turn the attic space into a second story. The ground floor bathroom was remodeled and a cantilever floor installed to expand it by two feet out the side of the building. An addition with a shed roof was added that included a family room, a laundry room, and a new back door. With that job, the kitchen was remodeled, including all new cabinets and countertops. Those cabinets were custom made by a local carpenter to a design drawn up by my parents on sheets of scrap paper while sitting at our kitchen table. That same year, I made a display of each type of wood used in the construction process for the science fair at our school. The display identified each type of wood, told where the wood was originally grown and how it was finished. The cabinet faces and doors were made of philippine mahogany, a loose term that applies to a number of wood species coming from southeast Asia. It is not “true” mahogany, but rather wood that is known by its common name Meranti. Within that group there are several different colors and densities of wood. Our cabinets were made of the wood called dark red meranti, which, of course is much more information than you need.

Interestingly, the design of the cabinets in the kitchen produced a U shaped area of counters with the narrow center section counter tops only 30 inches from the floor while the other counters were the standard 36 inch height. That section of 30 inch counter was specified by our mother for her dream kitchen so that she had a low counter upon which she could knead bread. She was not a tall woman and she needed to be able to put her shoulders into the hard work of mixing the final flour into the dough. Her old sunbeam mixer simply wasn’t big enough to handle the job. She mixed the bread dough by hand in a large stainless steel bowl. Two cakes of yeast proofed in warm water with a bit of sugar, 1/2 cup of lard, two eggs, a cup of sugar, two teaspoons of salt, 5 cups of water and 16 cups of flour. The flour was freshly ground in a home grinder from hard red winter wheat grown on my uncle’s farm and transported to our house in 30-gallon galvanized garbage cans.

Six loaves of bread every week. I can remember the recipe, but I can’t remember which day mother baked. It was a school day and the bread came out of the oven just as we got home for dinner. In our household, we had breakfast, dinner (at noon), and supper. We knew families that had dinner for their evening meal, but in our household, our father locked the door of his business at noon, came directly home, and we all sat at the table until he left to go back and open the business for the afternoon at 5 minutes to 1. There was an extra place at the table, just to my left, for the guest my father often brought home for lunch, usually a traveling salesman or a customer who happened to be in the shop when he closed up for dinner.

There have been long stretches of our family life when we have eaten bread from the bakery. In fact, the year Susan and I married, my summer job was in a commercial bakery, sorting racks of freshly-baked bread to fill the eight semi trailers that hauled it away 5 afternoons each week. The trailer that made the longest journey came back from Kansas City with cupcakes baked in that city. I learned to tell which bread was the freshest by the color of the twist ties on the bags.

Now that we are retired and settled, I generally bake on Thursdays. I make half of mom’s recipe and i use honey instead of sugar. 1/3 cup of honey will replace 1/2 cup of sugar. I add a quarter teaspoon of baking soda as well. I proof my dry yeast with a couple of drizzles of honey in the water. The hearth of our fireplace is just the right amount of extra warmth for the dough to rise quickly. I have a mixer that was new to our mom when all but two children were out of the house that can mix up my half recipe in a single batch. I knead the dough on a standard 36” countertop, but I am only a couple of inches taller than our mom and I know why she wanted the lower countertop.

I’m sure that it is a layer of memory and aroma and other senses that gives me so much comfort to bake bread. It just feels good and makes me happy. Susan and I don’t even eat three loaves of bread a week. One loaf usually goes over to the farm where hungry grandchildren consume it the first day it arrives. We have a couple of loaves in the freezer for weeks when I get lazy and don’t bake. There is no pressure and I take off a week whenever i want. We buy bakery bread and rolls whenever we need them. But I like to bake. It makes me feel good. It reminds me of our mother. It makes her seem close.

When our mom was in her late eighties, she came to live in our home. One day I was kneading bread and she asked me, “Where did you learn to do that?” I stopped and looked at her with what must have been a strange expression. “From you, Mom. Where else could I have learned it?” I don’t know if it was a moment of memory lapse for her. We were soon telling stories of baking and baking failures and laughing together. Now, every time I bake bread, I ask myself the same question as I start to knead. “Where did you learn to do that?” As long as I know the right answer to that question I think I’ll keep baking bread.