At 48, former world traveler and current mother of three Sheela Clary thought she had everything she needed for a three-night Airbnb getaway. But after eight months of all family and no trips, her brain was mush. The idea of solitude was as hazy as objects in her near vision, and her ability to plan a trip of any kind was very much in doubt. Still, in early November, with nothing to lose, she made the most impulsive decision she’d made since April 28, when she’d turned right instead of left at the rail trail.
Without family members, friends, colleagues or animals and driven only by a wish to be alone, she would make a list of essential things to bring, pack some bags and go somewhere with very low COVID infection rates. One dark and rainy Wednesday evening, she forged nort, against all odds — or at least the odds that she’d run out of prosecco in the middle of nowhere — hoping to reconnect with the independent woman she once was and wished to become once again.
There was no bread pan, but I wanted to bake bread, standing at the oven of a renovated barn apartment somewhere off Route 7. The day before, I’d written “bread pan” on the list of things I needed to bring, along with, among other things, good Irish butter, raw honey, four mini-bottles of prosecco, yoga pants, Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet” and Dr. Hauschka revitalizing mask, but the bread pan had been forgotten.
There was no bread pan in my luggage, and none in the house — actually not here, like, in any kitchen cupboard or bathroom cupboard.
I clutched my bag of organic bread flour to my chest like a four-pack of Charmin, though, of course, it was useless now. What is bread flour without a bread pan? It is an orphan grocery item that just gets things powdery.
In the years before, my first decade of motherhood, I’d been forgetting lots of other shit, too. I’d roamed and ranged 200,000 miles in my Honda Odyssey, from West Stockbridge to Great Barrington, then to school in Lenox Dale, then back to Great Barrington before heading home to West Stockbridge because I’d forgotten the diapers, peanut butter or milk. Then, in the punishing spring, summer and fall of 2020, before I forgot to pack a bread pan, my brain started to forget more consequential things. I forgot that my 12-year-old insisting she brushes her teeth every night doesn’t mean she does it, my laptop breaks down when I refuse to update it and that car tires don’t maintain themselves.
I forgot and forgot until I found myself, one early afternoon in November, bread pan-less in my barn. My new world. My red and black plaid coffee mug. My stack of Yankee magazines. My rattling heating system. My removable showerhead that sprays water in all directions but mine. My world, for three nights and two full days, three rooms with a view of two cows in a pasture, a world measuring about 600 square feet excluding deck.
A world called “Cozy Green Mountain Apartment: Dogs Welcome.”
At the oven, I dejectedly put down the flour. I looked at the door, where, somewhere out in the other world, there was a bread pan. I looked back at the kitchen, where there was no bread pan. I considered my options. There were only two, and I didn’t really feel like driving anywhere.
The old man who answered the number listed on the little cards next to the door yelled, “A what? A bread pan! Oh, geez, now, I’m sure the wife’s got wonna those, but I got no idea where she puts ‘em, see, and she won’t be home from school ‘til 3:30.”
He — my host, Bill, who lived with his teacher wife, Barbara, in the farmhouse in front of my barn — directed me to the dollar store in town. “They seem to have everything!” Reluctantly, and without changing out of my pajamas, I headed out. The store he’d directed me to sold only tiny little bread pans, much too little for the sandwich bread I was determined to make for my breakfasts and lunches. They wouldn’t do at all.
I was in the parking lot of the Family Dollar, the store that sold everything, and still I was bread pan-less. I took stock. I could take myself farther and farther from my cozy apartment without a bra, or I could go back and wait until the wife got home at 3:30, in the expectation that any self-respecting older female New Englander would own bread pans. But was that really a chance I was willing to take?
Also, why was I here again, in a town with a name I was not sure of, rather than at home with my solid Wi-Fi connection and ample supply of bread pans?
I’d come to somewhere in Vermont as the third wave of a global plague was ramping up. After eight months stuck at home with Donald Trump somehow left in charge of things, I’d had to take solace in the things at hand. My shirts were now too tight in the deltoid and triceps area, which, in my body, is the part where alcohol goes to settle down. My legs, however, looked great, because I’d covered enough mileage on the rail trail to reach the Florida border.
But by far my greatest pandemic comfort, the nearly eight complete seasons of which I’ve watched and rewatched and then watched again, is “The Great British Baking Show.” The intro montage of raspberry macarons, cake batter, whipped cream and farm bread is my pacifier. On bad nights I dream that mankind’s survival rests on my shoulders. On good nights I dream of cherry almond tarts, chocolate roulade and focaccia.
I went to the woods of Vermont because I wished to reconnect to my independent spirit, write the first chapter of a book, and because all I really wanted to do after Joe Biden won the presidency was to knead the shit out of a big ball of dough and then eat the loaf all by myself with good butter and raw honey.
But, it seemed, I might have to make do with gluten-free crackers.
I returned from the Family Dollar to find Bill, silver-haired, wearing a blue Navy Corpsman cap and windbreaker with a policeman’s badge on the chest, striding toward me from the door of his house. My first instinct, after having been recently trained in stereotyping, was to duck and run into the cow pasture, but I stood my ground.
“You find one?” he asked.
“No, I didn’t,” I lamented.
He chuckled, shook his head and opened his car door. “Just after I got off the phone with you, I tore the place apart. I’ve been out here hoping to catch you.”
From the front seat, Bill pulled out a large, metal bread pan.
Making and eating a loaf of bread was fun. It was more than fun. It was funny, too — someone who’s not a contestant in a TV baking competition, or generally of unsound mind, fretting maternally over the rise of her bread dough.
After I’d eaten my fill and washed it down with a gulp of prosecco, I leaned my head back and burped. “Thank you, Bill,” I thought. The future was unknown to me then, as I sat on a thoughtfully cushioned dining room chair watching a sprawling peach and red sunset over the cows. How would I lead my family through the long, dark winter ahead? How would our nation begin to knit itself back together? How can a girl get more prosecco up in this joint?
There were no answers. All I knew, all I know, all I will ever know, is that I — we — can’t do these things alone. We need one another.
