Love Comes From The Most Unexpected Places

I read my newspapers with scissors in hand, clipping away at sentences or fragments thereof; some days the New York Times looks like Swiss cheese when I'm done. Among yesterday's yield, "A single journey can change the course of a life," practically ripped itself from the page.

My best memories of five days at the dawn of 2010 in and within an hour's range of Petaluma, California, lapping up invitations to meet icons of the cheese world and watch them (and sometimes their cows, goats, and sheep) at work in the world's most beautiful places, center instead on a chance 6 A.M. meeting with the owner of Della Fattoria after what can only be described as a transformational moment gobbling her wood-fired bread, and the invitation to watch and learn at her farm-based bakery, where I walked in and it felt like home. While a week-long return visit to apprentice was quashed by one of those twin February 2010 blizzards, I was determined to find a way to make something resembling that kind of bread. A baking binge ensued, and when the dust settled and the snow melted, I got on the road and visited wood-fired bakeries in my beloved, next-favorite state (behind Maryland) of Vermont, also checking out a handful (between mouthfuls of poutine) in Montreal. And then I incorporated Cheese Happens just short of a year ago, choosing the name because it's cute and catchy - and elastic. Cheese, or bread instead of cheese, or bread and a little cheese, or the cakes and scones that won me awards and thirteen years of repeat business - sure - cheese happens. So pretty much every Sunday for the last year and a half I've baked one or two kinds of bread - sourdough, rye, fougasse, baguettes, bagels, etc., on the stone hearth in my Viking, grateful for such relative luxury, but always feeling the primal pull of fire.

Today, on the 24th anniversary of my wedding to, at the time, a most unlikely suitor, I finally admitted my tilt back towards the bakery biz by going to look at various raw rooms where I might again create an inspiring and functional workspace, knowing full well the zero probability, born of many complexities, of building a wood-fired oven in any of them. You could have knocked me over with a feather when, in a business I have frequented weekly for decades, the owner walked me to the back of his building to show me prospective space, which to my astonishment was commanded by an ancient, maybe operable, wood-fired oven. He nonchalantly said there had been two, he took the other down, and the building had been a bakery beginning back in the 1800s. My husband, an architectural historian, quickly found one of the owners had migrated to Maryland from Vermont.