It doesn’t matter how many times I see it. It always fills me. The Gold Medal Flour. The Guthrie. The Stone Arch Bridge. Anything downtown Minneapolis. Maybe it’s the case for any place you begin, but here, I will always keep beginning. 

I never baked bread before moving to France. Flour was merely the golden sign that lit a Minneapolis summer night. Bare shouldered in the warmth of evening, nothing could tire us. Nature’s season of laugher (and youth’s season as well) we could go all night. It’s funny, so many years later, I can still feel it. Not throughout my whole body, but in my heart’s mill, where I keep such pressure things. 

Waking this morning after the long flight back home, from home, it’s always a little disorienting. Neither time, nor yesterday seem real. But I make sense of it, mixing flour and yeast, water and salt. Fueled by the sweet light of what was and what will be. Nothing lost. All grist for the mill. Dough rising. And a new day begins.