WEEK
16
A Chill in the Air

Bread is relief for all kinds of grief.
—Spanish proverb

“I’m turning the heat on,” Anne said, wrapping her hands around a mug of coffee.

“But it’s May.”

“I’m freezing.”

“I’m fine,” I lied through chattering teeth. “What’s the temperature in here?”

“Sixty.” Fahrenheit, that is.

Outside, it was thirty-eight on this chilly spring morning.

“Once the sun hits the side of the house, it’ll warm up.” With a gallon of heating oil costing more than a gallon of milk, the oil bills for our rambling, nominally insulated old house were enough to support a modest Arab emirate, despite the fortune we’d spent on new, energy-efficient windows, and I was eager to end the heating season. I knew the house would be up to sixty-eight degrees by noontime and didn’t see the point of wasting oil to simply get it up there a few hours earlier. Let the woman wear a sweater. Or three.

Anne went upstairs to put on a second sweater, get under a down comforter, or both, and I returned to my loaf. That’s when I realized that my bread wasn’t going to rise much in a sixty-degree kitchen, considerably colder even than Bobolink’s proofing room. I turned the heat up, hoping that Anne wouldn’t guess why, especially given my recent coitus interruptus sourdoughus. All that coddling I did with the dough that day, my incessant gentle folding and turning? There had been no discernible change in the bread whatsoever. My attentions would’ve been better spent on my wife.