The man who taught me the most about love was also the man who left me. We met selling bread and vegetables at the farmers’ market. The market would hold theme days, and I noticed him on Wild West Wednesday. Usually in cutoffs and a dirt-smeared shirt, he stepped out in a crisp, blue button-down. He overheard I was having a bad day and strolled by with a bouquet from the stand he managed. It was common to trade between vendors, so I asked him if he wanted a croissant. “No,” he said, “they’re just for you.” The sound of his voice was a hot knife through butter.
In the beginning of our courtship, I was living downtown, still working for Farm & Sparrow, and he was an hour away, tending crops on a small family farm. On nights when he’d stay over, we’d wake up before sunrise and make pancakes. In those sleepy hours, while the stars speckled the sky, a hot griddle was an intimate gesture. After the season came to an end, he found a cabin with workable land and his own spot in the market. I wanted to farm and test my commitment to baking, so I left my job and started Smoke Signals. We shacked up in the countryside, seeking our fortune.
A parting gift from my baking comrades came in the shape of a beaten tote filled with fifty pounds of Turkey wheat. We spread it on an intensely sloped, freshly tilled field using an old broadcaster the day before Thanksgiving. We had read up on ancient rituals said to increase crop germination. The most common one involved a more figurate “sowing of the seed.” So we consummated the act behind the tractor, drunk on a bottle of mead. It sprouted tiny green hairs and then went dormant. We worried about it every day through the winter. It shot up in the spring as predicted, but so too did the weeds and the workload of running a farm and baking. It grew, but not like the amber waves of grain I had imagined. More like a patchy, pubescent beard. When it came time to harvest, we had nearly forgotten our once revelatory grass.
On July 3, with a dull scythe and my grandmother’s sewing scissors, we harvested it, standing in the blaring heat, making ragged shocks, and cutting stray heads into pails. We’d let it go a month longer than desired, and I wasn’t sure how viable or healthy the grain was. I left the meager yield in a cattle stall near the washstand and carried on.
Weeks later, I returned and filled a pink pillowcase with the wheat heads, beating them with a rolling pin to separate the protective chaff from the berry. Using a ladder, a box fan, and a bucket, we winnowed the wheat. My farmer climbed to the top of the ladder and poured the threshed grain past the fan, the chaff blew in the wind away, and the berries clanked into the bucket below. Each sweet drop of seed against plastic sounded to me like voices in a church choir echoing off marble walls. And yet I looked down at a year of work. I looked up at him. Sweat pouring down our faces mixed with sunburn and dirt. I can still hear myself saying, There’s barely enough for pancakes.
What happened is more complicated than I am going to tell you here, but the script is classic. Like paint peeling off a barn, our relationship came undone in the years we spent farming. With little to no outside income, we supported ourselves from what we could grow, and the bread barely paid for itself. To say the financial situation was a strain on our intimacy would be an understatement. I baked very little, saving up for weeks on end to purchase a decent sack of flour. Moving frequently to escape demanding landlords or hikes in rent, we lacked stability, and our bond eroded while our hearts grew as callused as our hands. The food around us grew tall and beautiful while the very middle rotted.
I heard rumors before I saw it with my own eyes. On a cool Sunday evening in the early spring, I walked into the local bar and found them sharing a basket of french fries. The way they leaned into each other made my stomach turn. I knew, from that exact second on, that he was going to leave. She was a longtime friend of mine, reeling from a breakup, so I invited her to supper at the house that evening. She declined. He said he had more work to do, so I shouldn’t wait up. I ate dinner alone to the sound of a train in the distance. It went on like this. He’d swing by the bar where she worked at night, and I’d eat solo at a table set for two. Eventually I put myself to bed, waking to the sound of his tires on the gravel hours later. The glow of his headlights on the bedroom wall and the sound of the doorknob turning became the opening bars to every country song.
It was impossible for me to leave the house without hearing passing comments on their budding friendship. Getting stopped in the toilet paper aisle of the grocery store to reassure folks that everything was fine became normal. Finally, her boss pulled me aside while I was getting coffee and mentioned seeing them together at her house at a time she knew I wasn’t aware of. I walked outside, called him, and told him it was over. We met on the front porch minutes later, and he asked how I was going to survive. I found something I never knew I had: a lucid calm stronger than steel. I turned to him with narrowed eye: “I don’t know,” I said. “But if I don’t respect myself, I’m poor in a way no silver or gold can repair.”
The day after he moved out, while I was at the one traffic light in town, they swaggered from the bar through the crosswalk in front of my car and piled into his truck. I pulled over three times on the five-minute drive home because my hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t steer. I took the ring he had given me months earlier for our anniversary and threw it into the pond. Starting a small fire in the fire pit, I lay down in the moist earth, and it held me as I cried myself to sleep. My only wish was that I wouldn’t have to wake up. Our farmland was miles away from the house, and I never set foot in the fields again.
My psychology was shattered. I’d lost my partner and my way of life. I wondered how cavernous the heart could be that you might lie down beside a person day after day and never know them. Never know how brutal they might turn, or what exactly they yearned for when their eyes shut. And I was embarrassed. In the same bar that we had walked into, arms full of bread and flowers, the languid eyes of our community had watched him fall in love with someone else. I couldn’t make eye contact. My pride was the only thing I had, and now even that was threadbare.
The dynamics of a breakup in a small town are particular. With less than 850 people, it was unreasonable to expect that anyone would really chime in on the matter. After all, the majority of the community was older and had already gone through several waves of marriages, divorces, affairs, and other questionable arrangements. So I retreated. Like an elimination diet, I stripped my contact down to a handful of friends and family. I was looking through the eye of a needle, and to pass through, there were things I would have to leave behind. When people conjure a picture of a simple life, they often do not imagine that the primary thing you first must forgo is other people.
I kept the jar of Turkey wheat on a bookshelf in the bakery. The grain was nearly five years old. I liked to check on it every now and then. Like a potion, swirls of perfume radiated from the berries. A cinnamon stick. A dash of pepper. Hay and sweat. Warm soil. It reminded me of what being innocent was like.
A year after he left, I ordered myself a gift. It arrived on a warm afternoon, just before the bread dough was to be divided. Inside a heavy brown box resided a small, tabletop mill. I knew what had to be done. I grabbed the jar, turned the mill on, and let the turning stones transform my most sacred possession into dust. With a slight tilt, years were crushed. Crushed into a fragrant mess. Crushed into something more useful than regret. Turning off the mill, clutching my blue bowl of flour, I leaned into the door frame and wept. Closure is something you give to yourself.
A note on freshly milled flour. Stone-ground flour is made by crushing grain between two stones. Milling slowly at cool temperatures ensures that all the original parts of the wheat berry, including the germ, are still present in the final flour. I call this intact, meaning that nothing is stripped away or added back during a later part of the process. Stone milling preserves the fats and aromas that tell our senses we are eating something good for both body and spirit.
Even when sifted, stone-ground flour will have tiny flecks of bran and be coarser than roller-milled flour. The presence of bran and a larger overall surface area result in a flour that can be “thirsty.” While freshly milled flour may tolerate high hydrations, it’s much easier to add water and adjust to the correct consistency rather than start too high, so that you have to recalculate an entire formula. Go slow, get into trouble slow: start with the appropriate amount of water and then add more as necessary.