bread &marriage... bread &marriage...

today heaviness tried to catch me. tried to pin me in the corner and steal my lunch money. my heart could feel the fight today... so many friends hurting, marriages cracking, edges teetering. signatures signing away what took a lifetime to build... marriage got beat up today.


days like today it starts to feel like shaky ground on which we walk. makes me hug my nate tighter and maybe slap him on the bum bum while he's doing the dishes just for good measure. sometimes it feels so wrong that through other's pain i can see my joy more clearly. through their cracks and crumbles my hands feel the weight of what i hold.
precious metal baby. precious metal.


how ridiculously simple it is to forget to love this man i wake up to every morning. to choose us every day.. but especially today. because today holds this breath and that is all we have...
i could love him tomorrow when i have time, when i'm not tired, when i feel like it, when i remember, when he deserves it...    but today i remembered what precious metal feels like. what a gift i hold in my hands and how easily i trample it underfoot.


i choose love today.
i choose truth today.
i choose to help and fight and grieve with those that are in that ring fighting for their marriages. and my heart breaks for the ones that peeled off their gloves and walked out.
to choose temporary happiness over a refining fire is worthy of pity indeed.


i also choose bread. homemade bread rising and wafting to hug me at the door. she gathers me up in her apron, smooths the stray hair from my forehead and shushes and hushes my sadness away. she is good to me... and she likes real butter as much as i do.




i have been using this book to make all our bread since it arrived in my stocking from santa. 5 minutes a day people. who could resist that??

that is pretty much what you need.. i got my container from target. it needs to be lidded but not airtight. this is a large batch no knead method. so it lives in your fridge and you pull off dough as you need it. there are lots of different recipes.. and different ways to bake them. the book is fabulous. if you want bread but can never remember to make it before 4 o'clock then you will love it.. you should get it. :)

this is turning into the sandwich bread... so you roll him up all beautiful like and put him night night in his pan to rest.

i like to let him rest in my warming oven. surely you have a warming oven... no?? ;)

meet 'betty' my 1952 chambers stove. she's a looker.

i plucked her off a mountaintop myself. i drove her in the back of a gigantic pick up truck through mountain roads, gale force winds, taking a wrong tour and winding up in kansas... which is not the state i live in. but i got all 500 pounds of her here safe and sound and she lives in my kitchen and loves me and  provides me with my very own warming oven.

which just sounds kind of awesome to say. :)

she has a lot of fancy levers that me feel happy. i don't know why ... but each and every time i look at her and her warming oven and her levers with the little names i get happy. :)

she hangs out with this other girl 'nicolette'. 
(this is normal right? i mean in high school we named our cars-- so it is totally normal to personify my appliances and cookware. that was a statement not a question. mmkay? thanks.)

nicolette is the cinnamon in betty's apple pie. she bright and brash and a total name dropper... but she knows who she is and the three of us get along just fine. :)

back to the bread... i could not even get a picture of this bread before someone had already cut into it and divvied up a third amongst himself and the ravenous children.

that is what wafting bread will do... it draws people out of the shadowy corners, sits them down at your kitchen table and i'll be darned if it doesn't even make grayson say please and thank you. that's magic in my book. :)

bread and marriage....
enjoy some today.   :)