Monday, October 25, 2010

you have to read between the lines

There was once a young girl who discovered that she liked to make bread. She made it whenever she could and it was always very good bread so that made her happy. When the young girl grew into a young woman and she had to find a job, she naturally looked in a bakery and was hired the very same day. The big bread-making benches and mixers and ovens were very exciting for someone who had only ever baked at home in her own small kitchen, but after many months of working every day in the big bakery for somebody else the woman began to lose her passion for making bread. She saw the unnecessary ingredients that her employer made all his bakers put into the dough to help it rise better and look whiter and stay fresher for many more days than it normally would. She felt bad about feeding this kind of fake bread to the people who came to the bakery. It started to make her sick. She planned to save all the money she earned from working at the bakery and use it to leave the town and travel to another country where she might find something else she liked doing. She eventually saved enough to leave the bakery and she tried other jobs, but there was nothing in her life that she loved doing as much as she loved making bread. More than a year passed and she returned to her home town, which she loved, and was offered a job at the same bakery she had left. She thought maybe it would be different but she was wrong. The fake bread made her sad and she lost her joy. Then she met a man who she loved even more than making bread, and they were married and her joy returned and multiplied though it had nothing to do with bread. She and the man became a family, then a larger family, and she spent more and more time away from her job at the bakery. She went days, sometimes weeks, without giving the bakery a second thought, but dreamed almost daily of making her own special heartfelt bread to feed her family. As her youngest child grew, the woman faced returning to the job at the bakery that weighed so heavily on her heart. She knew that her wages would help her family, and that it would feel good to work the dough with her hands and feel the heat from the bakery ovens. But in her heart she knew that it was not the same as the making of real bread.

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