Great in Bread

3 am. It's late spring, there's a chill in the air and I'm walking through the nearly empty streets of Charlottetown. The traffic lights are all blinking orange, reflected in the oily puddles left from the night's light rain. I'm not listening to music; I'm barely awake. Coffee in one hand and my patched denim jacket zipped up to my wool scarf. I'm already late, so I swig at my coffee and pick up the pace. By the time I get to work and change into my whites, I realize that I'm on auto-pilot, going through the motions of the night before, and the night before that…light on sleep, waiting for the caffeine to do its thing. I'm, possibly, still a little bit drunk.

When I walk into the bakery and flick on the lights—I've made it. It's go time. The ovens get fired right away, and I assess the dozens of loaves I left to proof overnight. I check the croissants, the buns, and get to work prepping, rolling, and folding the next breads for proofing. What happens after those first few minutes really dictates what kind of a morning it's going to be, because after the ovens are hot, my next 9 hours are set to the beat of a timer at 10-18 minutes intervals until it's time to go home, work my day job, get drunk, and try to pass out early enough to be awake by 2:30 am tomorrow.

I loved baking bread; and, waking up early, spending most of my shift alone, coated in flour, my hands forming the loaves that would feed hundreds of people in just a few hours, left me feeling sort of important. Considering the chaos of my life at that point, in my 20s, that was as good as it got. It was also as much people-ing as I could handle. I was still coming to terms with my gender at that time, and still presenting pretty masc, but just being a baker—with other women bakers—was rad.