Free 52 Loaves by William Alexander

the pace slowing, as weary smiles started to appear on the tired faces of the bakers. A steady rain fell on the tin roof above our heads, making conversation almost impossible. Lindsay stepped out into the downpour and reappeared a few minutes later with a wheelbarrow full of firewood. She was soaking wet, the rain on her floury skin giving her the look of a loaf that had just been spritzed in the oven.
    Lindsay weighed out the wood needed for that night’s fire—exactly 175 pounds’ worth (bakers weigh everything, I noticed)—which would bake tomorrow’s bread. The last baking task of her long day would be to start the fire before leaving the bakery.
    Now, for the first time in the entire afternoon, there really was nothing to do but wait for the loaves. The rain continued to fall as the light faded from the room. When the intern materialized with a wine bottle, my own fatigue suddenly evaporated. A glass of wine sounded lovely. Except that the bottle held olive oil. Lindsay poured some into a bowl and grabbed a bread knife and a small loaf made with left over dough. A stick of homemade butter came out of the fridge. Good, fresh unsalted butter has a clean taste that enhances the flavor of bread, and this butter, spread onthe slightly warm bread, was extraordinary. I actually felt a little drunk as I let the bread and butter play on my tongue, trying to absorb every bit of flavor before swallowing.
    A few slices later, Lindsay took my loaf out of the oven. “It’s singing!” she said, her eyes lighting up. “Listen!”
    Sure enough, the bread was crackling, as the hot crust, a beautiful dark brown with shades of caramel and molasses, came into contact with the cooler air.
    “Is that a good thing?”
    “Oh, yes, that’s a very good thing,” she said, laughing.
    No doubt about it, this was the most beautiful loaf I’d ever baked. It had sprung like never before in the oven; even my slashes, usually disastrous, had come out perfectly. I could hardly wait for it to cool to slice it open and see if the crumb matched the promise of the crust.
    I thanked Lindsay and stepped out into a beautiful late after-noon, washed of dust and doubt, full of hope and optimism, as a wisp of a rainbow appeared in the east, exactly in the direction I was driving.
    I followed it home, smiling the entire time.

III.
Terce
    A Latin term for third hour. One prays for light and strength as the day waxes strong and one’s work begins.

WEEK
11
Goddisgoode
    I beg you . . . to bear in mind that my observations and opinions are only the result of my own impulse and curiosity and that there are in this town no amateurs who, like me, dabble in this art.
—Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, letter to the Royal Society, 1673
    Weight: 199 pounds
Bread bookshelf weight: 18 pounds
    “Anne, can you bring home your microscope for the weekend?”
    She just stared at me, unblinking.
    “What’s the problem?” I asked. “I’ll be careful with it.” Anne is a physician of the old-fashioned sort who still looks at slides (of what, I’d rather not know) under a microscope and has a nice one in her Office.
    “It’s not that. What do you want to look at?”
    What was this all about? Oh, right, the last time I had borrowed her microscope was twenty years earlier. Exactly. How do I know that? Because Zach was now nineteen. In the second year of our marriage, after having unprotected sex, oh, five or six times with no results of the reproductive variety, I was positive I was sterile. Perhaps it was my concern about the really hot baths I love to take or some painful but temporary sports injuries down there, but I think my hypochondria was mainly the result of having had it drummed into my head since junior highschool health class that only two things can happen when you have intercourse: pregnancy and disease. The third possibility, that most of the time you’d simply have some fun, was somehow never mentioned.
    Thus when I spilled a little of my seed onto a