love for aunt vernetta

I was flipping through the book of recipes we got for Christmas and stopped when I came to Aunt Vernetta's bread. I am actually surprised that there is a measured recipe - I'm fairly certain that Vernetta's kitchen is where I learned to cook without measuring anything.

I was young the first time I helped her make bread. Did she teach us all? Her kitchen was still the original farmhouse kitchen, big and full of light, that enormous table taking up most of the floor space - a table seated to capacity two and three times each day with family and the hired help considered family. Making bread was an intimate, tactile experience, hands in the flour, kneading the warm dough back before Bosches and bread makers. I can recall the dark, rich smell of that last batch just before it came out of the oven - you always had to burn the last batch for Uncle John. And I can still hear her voice. Kimmie said it on her blog - "That's about right," she would say, soft and in a little sing-song lilt from repeating it to me - or all of us.

Time always moved differently on the farm. Slower, as if the current of light and air moved with the wide loop of the Bear River down on the far side of the farm. When I was really little, it was Vernetta's big boots I followed out to feed the calves. Later it was the cousins, and then when I brought my children, it was the cousin's children. But in the beginning, Aunt Vernetta led us to the back of the milking barn, split the milk and water and just the right amount of mix into buckets and the big plastic bottles. The feral kittens popping out from the hay barn. The calves with their rough tongues and heads butting up into your face if you weren't careful.

I can even recall feeding chickens with her, back when there were chickens in the top of the old barn - after it was the playhouse, after it was something else, I am sure.

Once when I was little, I leaped from the highest point I could find in the hay barn (our favorite pastime back when there were bales stacked like towers in there) and gashed my head on an exposed nail from one of the rafters. I know I ran screaming like a banshee to find Aunt Vernetta, who calmed me down, dressed my little wound, and gave me a glass of milk and a piece of bread. Those soldiers at Pearl Harbor she cared for during WWII probably got the same gentle care, only without the bread and milk.

My memories do not reach back so far as when I was a baby and lived there on the farm, but I am told that I didn't want to go back to my parents by the time they came to get me. Perhaps it was that early bonding that took me back throughout my life, even if it was only in my mind, to get my feet under me, re-ground, breathe a sigh of relief. And make bread.

Grieving the loss of a loved one is such a personal experience. Even with understanding and release. My life was made better for Aunt Vernetta. Because of her and Uncle John, the farm was always a place of sanctuary for me, a reliable anchor in my otherwise nomadic childhood and chaotic youth. My love and gratitude goes out into the universe today in remembrance and honor.

Sherri