Cheers everyone and welcome to Friday’s Morning Open Thread.
Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum.
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Notes from Below Sea Level
“The Curvature of Light”
He would start by putting several hand fulls of flour on the wide wooden kitchen counter, running his weathered-rough fingers through it as if to pull memories from its fineness. From a small red cardboard vat he would sprinkle baking powder in wide arcs—motes of the dry mix suspended in the early morning light filtering in through the widow behind him, gently bent around his silhouette as he eclipsed the breaking dawn; then he took salt from his left palm and massaged it between his thumb and first two fingers, circling the mass in an inspired expanding spiral like a master alchemist teaching a master class. Tender mornings describe his cupping the flour and sifting it through his fingers before gathering the concoction into a mound and hollowing out the peak to hold cold milk from the sweating glass jar at his elbow.
At this point, he would motion with his head for me to pull the old tin sheet from the pan below the now-preheated oven and make sure it was brushed off. I would take pinches of flour from around his kneading space and awkwardly copy his caressing with thumb and first two fingers, eventually spreading the sporadic lumps with the palm of my hand. Having mixed liquid and dry and folded and refolded a few times, he would quickly move the ball around it while spreading more flour on the dry boards before beginning his rolling out. He did it quickly with smooth but knowing strokes, angled each in turn from the previous, his wide palm guiding the wooden roller’s pressure just so.
For a mold he would pull from the top shelf of the cabinet a single juice glass—the only juice glass we owned (purchased years ago when green stamps were all the rage) and known by all in the house not to be used for any purpose. Dipping the open rim into an inch of flour, he would economically stamp out eight or ten discs and flick them onto the pan I steadied on the warmed end of the counter. I would space them out an inch or so apart: neat, even, pleasing rows. When he exhausted the available real estate, he would roll the remnants into a ball and begin the folding process again. Over and over until the pan was filled and another dozen or so sat on a thin flour bed waiting for space once the first batch of biscuits was removed from the oven.
My father made biscuits most Saturday mornings of my life, but it wasn’t until I was seven or eight that I was keen enough to get up early enough to watch him work, eventually earning the right to help in small ways here and there. When the first batch was golden brown and dumped on the counter and the second batch in, we would open them and drop a chunk of butter on the underside of the top—the steam rising on the smell of roasting flour bringing us closer together, blinkering the room down to the cloud of warmth within. On the bottom we would spoon chilled fig preserves the color of worn oak trapped in amber. It was never a filling breakfast, but more a shared daily bread that never failed to satiate my hunger for knowing that the day ahead was something I could handle. Remembering such singular and rare mornings we spent together serve to remind me of the massive and immovable forces I have encountered in my life that have caused the arc of my own story to shift—if ever so slightly—for the better or worse. And through him, I’ve come to accept that there is no denying the physics of our futures.
(March, 2021-2024)
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My hope for the day is that each of you celebrates life in one way or another and finds peace in these turbulent times. Be well, be kind, and appreciate the love you have in your life.
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Grab your coffee or tea and join us, please.
What's on your mind this morning?