Baking Bread

I open the oven door to a blast of heat and hot bread bulging out of a high tin, brown, crusty and ready to be taken out. That smell wafts across seventy years to when I can remember bread being delivered in a horse and cart. Carrying a big wicker basket full of hot bread, the baker would run house to house whilst his horse ambled along at a pace in perfect sync with the bakers progress along the street. Weekday mornings I would wait out front and rush the hot bread inside for my mother to make me sandwiches for lunch. Mum always complained that the bread was too hot for cutting. I had a steaming slice smothered in butter before I left for school. Big, thick, uneven slices of bread holding metwurst or cheese or peanut butter greeted me when I opened my lunchbox at school. Bread was never better. Nearing eighty, I keep baking bread, writing poems, as if trying to recapture those pleasures still steaming in the past before they go.