Applying
I meant to make the bread earlier today but the power has been intermittent all morning and our generator isn’t working. Now that the electricity seems more stable, I am rushing to get these loaves in the oven so they’ll be ready in time for dinner. E is lobbing questions at me from the dining room as she digs into her first college application in earnest. I hit pause on my playlist. It’s difficult enough to hear over the whir of the mixer and the drone of the water distiller. I don’t need the Arcadian Wild competing for my limited listening resources as well.
After several clarifications through the wall E gives up and comes in the kitchen. She balances her computer on one knee as she hovers beside the counter strewn with jars of flour, yeast, and salt. I pause to look at her screen to understand exactly what the college is asking. With a bit of a shock I realize that it has been some 33 years since I did this myself. It feels entirely likely that several important things have changed.
Between sprinkling the yeast over the warm water and adding the honey, I pass her my credit card information to send her SAT scores to her prospective schools. It bothers her to have us pay for this expense but I tell her that we want to cover it. I assure her that there will be no end of expenses she will be taking care of on her own soon enough.
As the mixer kneads the bread I confirm our address details. In our lifestyle entering our address cannot be done by rote. Each new form raises the question of which address to use. Do they want our mailing address here? What about our permanent address in the States? Surely they aren’t asking for our physical address here.
We go over options for who would be best to ask for letters of recommendation as I divide the dough into four mounds on the counter. This is a conversation we’ve been having at the dinner table for weeks now but it never seems quite a settled issue. My fingers are sticky and my feet cold on the tile floor. During our first two years in Madagascar the temperature had already begun to rise by September. Spring has been slow in coming this year. I’m going to have to give the bread an extra 15 minutes of rise time to make up for this cold weather.
What leaves me feeling unsettled is just how mundane this all is. This is the same type of body doubling and reassurance of competence I have done dozens of times for me children. The mechanics are no different from helping one of them file their taxes but it carries an entirely different charge. Maybe that is what I’m feeling—the current of preparing her to leave, to seek what’s next, while accomplishing routine things like making bread so there can be peanut butter jelly sandwiches this week. It feels unfair that paving the way for her departure can masquerade as admin work. Shouldn’t there be more caution signs or at the very least, a bit of fanfare?
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