Falkenberg: Grandma's bread, the stuff of life

Usually, I'm not the New Years resolution-making kind. I'm just not that optimistic.

If I'm going to fail to exercise, or to read more poetry, or to organize family photos, I'd rather fail in private, without any grand public pronouncements that I was ever going to do it in the first place.

This year is different. I have a resolution. It has to do with homemade bread and with my grandmother, Lydia Falkenberg. And if I'd made this resolution years ago, I might not be writing this column today. Let me explain.

Grandma was never the wet-smooching, dimple-pinching kind. She never had chocolate waiting, or frilly store-bought outfits, or costume jewelry laid out for dress-up.

The color pink didn't exist in her home, an austere farmhouse in rural Guadalupe County down a long gravel drive where the floors were always swept, bedclothes pulled tight, and luxury was an archival collection of Reader's Digests.

The place was so country it made a kid from Seguin feel city.

Once, my older sister, the fashionista of the family with her midnight eyes and designer jeans, made a startling discovery in Grandma's bedroom: a bottle of bright red fingernail polish.

My sister's imagination soared with fantastical explanations. Did Grandma secretly indulge in this most girly of grooming rituals when no one was around? Did she hide her blazing toenails like silent sirens under utilitarian footwear?

Not exactly.

"I use it for markin' stuff," Grandma explained matter-of-factly.

All this isn't to suggest that the house where my grandparents raised five children while farming, running a filling station and worked various other jobs was unwelcoming. There was poetry in the car wheels crunching over that long gravel road

At night, the stars bloomed like highway flowers. In the afternoon, curtains whirled in the wind like waltzing skirts. And in the morning, Grandma would begin her bread.

Finally, we have come to the bread.

For a no-nonsense woman of strong German stock, that bread seemed my grandmother's only extravagance. It was her fluff, her art, her perfume.

The magic wasn't in the flour or the Crisco or the yeast. It was in the process. The hours-long process, which led to hours-long anticipation for those of us watching. The mixing of the ingredients, and then the careful, muscular kneading of the dough, not once, not twice, but four times - each session separated by long bouts of greasing, covering, resting and rising.

I can still remember her hands at work, and the power in her aging arms, even in later years as they took on a violet hue beneath pale papery skin. The kneading occurred with such precision that at times the flabby mass of dough seemed to be moving with her, folding, flopping, and stretching at her whim, by its own might.

Then it went into the oven.

A delicious smell

Pounds of poems could be written about the smell of baking bread. They probably have been. But it is beyond the grasp of metaphor when the smell is wafting through your own grandmother's kitchen, through the very halls where you played, into the very quilts she used to fold into a pallet for naps on the floor.

That smell lived in the cotton of Grandma's white hair, in her sensible collared dresses, in her hugs hello and goodbye, in the air that lingered after she passed by.

If we were visiting just for the day, she'd usually have a loaf ready, or she'd pull one from the deep freeze. The dome of thick dark crust gave way to a soft, silken inside, complete with nooks and crannies beckoning us to get lost in them. Slathered with butter, topped with dried sausage, that bread was a thing to behold - at least for a few seconds until we gobbled it up.

When I grew older and finally learned my way around a kitchen, I became curious about bread-making and tried out different recipes. Most of them resembled some Hill Country rock formation more closely than anything from my grandmother's oven.

"It's all in how you knead the dough," Grandma once told me. She offered to show me. Long after she'd moved out of the farmhouse and into an apartment in New Braunfels, she offered to show me.

Dreaming for years

In the meantime, she referred me to her recipe that had appeared in her Lutheran church cookbook, entitled "Feeding the Flock." I studied the recipe and dreamed of kneading that dough in a warm, sunny kitchen alongside my grandmother.

For years, I dreamed of it. But dreaming was all I really did. Life got in the way - work stuff, kid stuff, stupid, unimportant stuff.

Then, one day in October, my grandmother was gone. A few weeks shy of 94, she passed away suddenly after what appeared to be a series of strokes.

She had lived a full life, but the loss cut deep, and not just because I loved her. I felt like a tree watching the severing of its longest, strongest root. She was my last surviving grandparent. With her went the stories she never told, the bits of wisdom she never shared, the wry quip she never uttered. With her went that afternoon we never shared baking bread.

Take the time to do it

So, here's my resolution: to make the bread from Grandma's old Lutheran cookbook, to make it well, and to someday teach my children. Grandma won't be there with me, but I have some helpful notes taken by my sister and a cousin, who did make time to learn from the master.

And I resolve to do this: to crawl out of this electric mixing bowl-of-a-life every now and then and make time for doing important things, slow things, with people I love. I encourage you, dear reader, to join me.

Make that call, play that board game, have patience for that long winding story. Bake that bread, while you've still got the chance.