Midnight Mutterings | Fiction

Look, I wrote a nice column before midnight called ‘Milkman.’ It was a memoir muttering about another time and place. I dutifully copied it along the way occasionally so it wouldn’t be lost in the cobwebs of my newest (three years old) MacAir. It was about a page and a half long and moderately interesting, at least to me. Then it %!!?#’!! disappeared and I can’t find it. So you get this instead. It’s totally fiction I wrote it about a month ago as an exercise in writing to a photo prompt I thought might have been in Eastern Washington where the wheat grows. Turns out it’s closer, a real place in Edison, Washington, I think. Maybe Bow. Anyway, I have not only passed the BreadFarm many times on my way to Bellingham. In fact I’ve had lunch there at least once. What I have not done is live there. At any age. Nothing you can read below is true, except I do have a brother who built things and I risked my life as his willing test pilot. The rest: totally made up. I don’t think it’s as interesting as the memoir piece that is hiding somewhere in the ether of my laptop. If it emerges ever, I might post it here, but for now, I offer this bit of fiction that was fun to write. With apology: jb

When We Lived at the BreadFarm

Don’t imagine fields of hard red winter wheat in the harsh heat of Eastern Washington.  Our farm/bakery was in a little village in the center of the state. In a low concrete building, that would have been more comfortable in Russia or China, where we baked bread.

The small commercial oven on the ground floor heated the tiny apartment upstairs our family called home. Two rooms bathed in the constant scent of fresh baked bread.

I was nine, my brother twelve, when we moved there in the seventies from the perfect weather of California’s Bay Area and a hippy commune gone terribly wrong. For the newly minted adults, at least. It was only later that I realized we have to learn to own before we can share. And that it is as true for time and relationships as well as cash and material goods.

We kids had it great on the commune though, running wild, building things, dropping in on any family for dry clothes, a band aid or a snack surreptitiously snagged from the communal kitchen. If there was conflict, there was always another kid eager to play.

Downstairs in the BreadFarm, in addition to the baking room with it’s oven and stacks of supplies, there was a huge commercial Kitchen Aid mixer rising from the floor, and wide tables for working with the dough and large, warm cupboards for proofing. Our mother did most of the prep while our father manned the oven, which could bake only twelve large sourdough loaves, or twice as many half loaves. He also did deliveries in a tiny Toyota pickup he kept running with paperclips and too much oil that regularly baptized the parking pad behind the BreadFarm.

My main job that I chose for myself was spraying the raised loaves with cold water before they went into the oven. Just the right amount to develop a chewy crust without making it soggy. My brother was developing his building skills born on the commune. First it was vehicles without power he rolled down the only hill in the village. I was his test pilot and wore the scrapes from the lack of brakes my brother was too impatient to build until after he was satisfied with the speed.

Downstairs, the other room was the tasting room where drop-ins could get a cup of self-served coffee and a torn corner of warm bread for a dollar. The honor system was overseen by our Calico cat who sat in the front window looking over the street while she guarded the cash cup. The tasting room was very popular with the locals who were generous enough with their tips to cover costs and a little more.

My brother and I shared the small bedroom upstairs and eventually he built a screen between us that gave him more privacy as he had to walk through my space to get to his. I didn’t mind ,though, because the screen gave me space to pin pictures from magazines of rich girls’ bedrooms furnished with pink, four-poster beds and fancy dolls who would never have survived the commune.

My brother’s side of the screen served him with space for pictures from magazines I never saw him read of marginally clothed adult females. I shared my half to the room with the cat at night and all the books she and I read before sleep.

Our parents slept in the other room, a combination kitchenette and living room on a pull out couch with noisy springs. The bathroom with a tiny shower was inconveniently located downstairs, off the tasting room. We could clearly hear our parents at night with their ‘discussions’ and make up attempts.

One morning when I woke up my mother was missing and I never saw or heard from her again. I know my brother spent his early adult years looking for her, but I don’t know if he ever found her. He didn’t say and I didn’t ask.

A few months after she left, my father moved us to his parents’ farm where they grew apples and pears in large orchards with the help of migrant workers. They lived in shacks even smaller than our apartment over the BreadFarm, then moved on. My father thrived on the farm and still lives there now, through he has the expected health problems of his age. My brother and I went to college and moved to different large cities to recreate many of our parents’ mistakes in our own lives. We text unsatisfactorily, and I don’t know much about his life and he knows the same about mine. I never bake bread, but I do keep a little jar of sourdough starter alive in my fridge in case I ever get the urge. It’s kind of like a scrapbook of a part of my childhood. And I have a Calico cat and sometimes I read to her while she sleeps on my bed. Her purring tells me she especially appreciates poetry.