Kiss the Bread

and other prayers

Peka Bread. Image courtesy of expatincroatia.com

My dad’s mom was named Ana, and she would come to stay every so often for weeks and months at a time. Dressed in her widow’s black, with a scarf on her head, she would come across the Atlantic ocean, to get a taste of the new world. With a suitcase full of homemade liquors and cheeses for family and small store-bought gifts for us children, our grandma would land and worlds of all sorts would collide.

Barely out of JFK airport, she would open her large “valise” and begin the process of very serious gift-giving. Out came chocolates and little dolls wearing traditional costumes, or some ornate slippers made of sheepskin. Nothing she brought took batteries, and so they were nice gifts but maybe a little disappointing. After the chocolate was eaten and Grandma had settled in, the weeks and months stretched ahead of us.

She came to school to pick us up, wearing her big black skirts and wiping her face with a kerchief as she stood in the sun. She wore no makeup and didn’t own pants. Sometimes as we walked home together I would wonder if my grandma was actually a thousand years old because she seemed so out of touch with the world.

Things I didn’t know about my grandma could fill a book, and in some ways they already do since people like my grandma are found in all sorts of books, just not by name. They’re in these stories we now share about the old days and ways. Sometimes we point to these people in our books and we define them as indigenous or pre-industrial relics, but for some of us they are by some miracle of circumstances, grandmas and grandpas we actually knew.

I am the youngest child of my grandma’s youngest child. The fact that she and I managed to know each other was nothing short of a miracle considering the time, the distance, the very ocean and borders between us. So what does this have to do with bread?

Well, let me tell you:

One day Grandma was having some words with my father and she got annoyed with him. I couldn’t understand everything she was saying because the words were flying in dialect, but it wasn’t good. She was laying into him because she noticed something really disturbing, something so unnerving she couldn’t keep silent. Grandma said, that she noticed we were…wasting food. She said we were not paying attention and food was flying into the trash. My father tried to defend himself and the household. He explained how mostly we ate everything.

Now Dad was probably correct that we were trying. We cleaned our plates. We ate leftovers. We were by all local standards, keeping the food appreciation up and the food waste down. Of course, Dad was also talking from his quickly modernizing perspective, from his full and happy belly. He had known hunger in his mother’s house, and he would rather have more than less food on the table. In fact, he would rather work harder and harder to have not just food, but cars and nice clothes for him and his family. Anyway, we didn’t have any chickens or pigs to take up the slack. We were, he sighed, doing our best.

Grandma narrowed her glare and got up from the table. She went to the bread drawer and picked out a once crusty roll from the bakery. She pulled it out and showed my dad the mold. She shook her head back and forth and said more things under her breath. Then all of a sudden she did something I had never seen her do before: she kissed the rotting bread.

My grandma Ana kissed the bread, threw some crumb to the birds and the rest to the trash. Then she scowled at all of us, and left the room in a silent huff. I was stunned.

I had seen people kiss the ground from time to time. That ground kissing, I had seen it on TV done by the Pope or some president, and definitely by some recently released hostage or prisoner, but never had it dawned on me that someone would kiss bread.

I realize now, I didn’t know my grandma at all as a child, not just because we fought over silly things, but because she mostly showed up as a visitor in our world. She came in like an alien with pictures and stories and little mementos from her planet, but we didn’t — in fact couldn’t exactly imagine it.

In that one move of kissing the bread, I was suddenly living between her reality and mine. It was as if I saw her for the very first time. She wasn’t this funny old lady from some village none of the neighbors could pronounce. Standing in her angry glory on behalf of that bread, Grandma Ana was a fiery queen not to be crossed.

I knew my grandma had baked her own bread, but I had no idea what that meant. I had no idea my grandma had baked her daily bread quite literally for years without rest. I had no understanding of what it meant for her to make bread, because I couldn’t grasp that she had to grow the wheat, much less bring the water from the well. I had no idea she had to get the bread together from the grain to the milling to the fire and finally, the loaf. I was ignorant over how many twigs and logs she nursed into coals before the dawn broke the night into busy days.

I had no idea that as a widow there was absolutely no one to build grandma an oven, so she baked her bread in a covered cast iron pot, under the ashes, in a hole in the Earth. She baked bread like that every single day she had a child to feed. She baked it like that for years after it was only her alone in the house, because what else was she going to do with her time? Today they give tours so people can taste that exact kind of bread.

I know that my grandma was much more than her sufferings, and that if she were alive today she might even be a star YouTuber like this other Balkan grandma named Bina, or her Italian-American counterpart, Gina. Grandma knew how to make a dollar from two nickels or more exactly one Deutschmark from two Dinars, but honestly, I don’t expect you to get that joke. Currencies like borders have changed a lot since grandma was scraping together a life.

Anyway I can imagine her now with her long, grey braids tied around her head, covered by the scarf, her lightning blue eyes piercing the camera. I can see her calling in the devil in a brief fit of anger and then praising God as she laughs away her own fury. I can see her disbelief as she happens to mention the shameful fact that her granddaughter buys yeast instead of making it at home. Really, how hard is it to keep a little yeast in the cupboard??

So if you’re feeling lost or a little tired today, maybe try kissing the ground at your feet, or the bread in your hand.

You can speak words of praise or thanks while you do it, or you can just do the thing.

Notice how strange, or how good it feels.

Notice how it changes your relationship to that three day old roll or that dried out pizza headed for the bin or the backyard compost. You can make sure nobody sees you if you’re a little embarrassed.

Take that step today and I promise, at least one little grandma will send you a blessing, because what my grandma did, is what your ancestors did too. Somewhere in your lineage, someone kissed the ground, kissed the bread and they quite definitely kissed the sky. Somewhere in your history your ancestors drank the wild waters of the springs that ran clear and with every sip, they kissed that too.

From these small kisses our daily bread becomes something less of a product or craft, less of an obsession and much less of an object. From these small kisses the food we grow, make or eat becomes a relationship that crosses divides between all space and time. So, do it today, before your next meal or your next compost session; kiss that which feeds you, or that which was willing to feed you, and see what happens.

xo from me, Mariette Ana Papić ;-)

PS to learn more about this bread technique used by my grandma and many others, follow this link.