How Bread Rises

Before the yeast, there was only flour and time— grain milled down to its white secret, everything it was scattered into fine waiting. You add water cooler than the hand that holds it, the yeast rousing from its dormant cold, something small beginning to believe. The bowl sits on the counter through the morning. What rises cannot be hurried; it has its own dark logic, its own necessary heat. The oven opens like a confession. Inside: the quick conversion of waiting into crust, the crumb pulling apart in honeyed threads, steam lifting off like something released. To break bread is to learn that patience is another name for hunger— what we tend through the long hours asks, in the end, to be shared.