The Strength Would Be Nice -- and the Structure

I should be reading.  Or something.  These, after all, are quieter days.  The mercury is hovering around the single-digits, there is snow on the ground and even the chores set aside for “slower times” are forgiven until it warms.  Except for the greenhouse plantings this is the garden’s fallow season when the earth’s instinctual calisthenics quietly rejuvenate toward spring.

  And I should be doing the same -- learning about seed selection, soil amendments, bug prevention, watering requirements, and why the cabbage leafed last summer but never formed a head; why not a single brussels sprout seed germinated despite 2 separate plantings.  Or I could simply ponder the grace-filled wonder of the carrots -- seeds that were a free gift accompanying the varietals I had actually ordered -- planted and then largely forgotten, that became the surprise bounty of the fall rediscovered only as I was bedding the rows down for the winter.  Or the tenacious generosity of the okra plants that never reached their bushy stature but nonetheless insisted on offering up their spiky fruitfulness from their gnomic twigs.  Or the kindness of the deer who thoroughly inspected the garden confines up until the time I planted, and then disappeared, returning only after the harvest was completed.

Instead I flit around the house like a hummingbird with ADHD, reading headlines but seldom the stories beneath them; returning books to the library only partially read; jumping into this while jumping out of that; eschewing complex sentences for mere subjects and predicates; sustaining an extended thought only under duress.

Perhaps it is the holiday season.  Perhaps my abbreviated attention span is tracking with the shortness of the days.  All I know is if I were Morse Code I couldn't spell anything of consequence -- all “shorts” and no “longs”; dots without dashes.



In pasta and bread making, we’ve been taught, there is the measuring and the mixing, the rising, perhaps, and even the resting; but eventually there is the kneading -- folding the dough onto itself and then pressing into it with the heal of the hands; stretching, rolling, folding again and then pressing.  Over and over again -- the tactile paradox of gentleness and forcefulness -- until the dough becomes itself, elastic but integral; firm but responsive.  It is the kneading that forms the gluten strands that give the dough structure and strength; it’s what holds the pasta or the bread together.  The proteins that are the gluten, of course, are already there; the kneading simply draws them together and develops them into long and resilient strands that lend the dough the character desired -- that make fine pasta or bread truly “fine.”

Perhaps, then, it’s kneading I’m needing -- some imposed and methodical stretching to lengthen my constitutional strands.  I don't quite know how to go about it, but I know there is a rhythm to it, a determined physicality, a rather disconcerting but satisfying stickiness, and a willingness to clean up the mess.  

Those, and the enticing capacity to anticipate the results.  It seems like good winter work.