Poppy Seeds and Almond Extract

what we do for each other in this now

The start of some handmade cards, photographed in shadow and in light

It is thirteen degrees and dark out there when a text pings in from my friend Kathy: Yesterday, I baked these little poppy seed loaves and thought you might enjoy one… It’s in your mailbox.

Out into the cold dark. Back into the warm light. A blue-bowed gift now on the counter. The kind of bread only Kathy could make, with its multiple extracts and eggs and sugar and flour, its democratic dispersion of those minuscule black seeds, its risen center and its lightly sweetened crust.

It has been a week of sorrows, weather crush, accelerated unkindness, terrifying proclamations, raging short-sightedness. It has been stampede, and how to breathe beneath the boot crunch. But here, rescued from the dark, is Kathy’s bread, and there, in a cathedral, is a Bishop’s most elegant and eloquent courage, and, at this hour, beyond this window, there is the moon making room for the sun.

We won’t make it through without each other. Without the bread we bake or the cards we send or the notes that we sign, Love. It is one thing to say no, and we must. It is another to say yes—to our families, our friends, our neighbors, our communities—and this, too, is the requirement of now. Yes, I understand. Yes, I honor you. Yes, I am right here. I drove out into the dark, and I left you something sweet. Let’s take a walk, let’s be together, sometime soon.