Bread Flower

Flowers on street-trees are surreal in an unnoticeable way; they are in a world of their own, an incongruent parallel zone, sitting delicately waiting to be penetrated by life on concrete-paved road, by rushing cars and drunken bar-goers. Perhaps we are the sub-real part: Imaginary politics and imaginary monetary value has paved over and cheatingly established the unknowable for us, forming solid brick-like meaning in our fluctuating, fleshy, watery bodies. The trees don’t need hair braids, or expensive shoes. The sunlight shifting through their leaves doesn’t need fake perfume, and nor do the birds that live off our crumbs in a urine-smelling city built with money and posters of things-you-need-because-you-don’t-have-them-yet.

The sun’s heat gradually swells through cool night air and no shops are open in Osoppo except the two bakeries. There’s something which is real: the smell of bread baking in the morning. The smell of toasted wheat and seeds is something whole; sugary and creamy and salty all at once. Yeasted bread is crammed together by so many different human processes, yet it requires patience. Feeding, watering, warming and waiting to create food that is so satisfying to our mouths. Bread joins the real time outside of clocks, time which varies according to processes and energy, light and heat; rather than mechanics and paced ticking. We wait for bread to grow, bubble into a whole, before sealing it in the oven: Hands, heat, breathing. The bakery opens at 6.30 am, and I can imagine worn fat female palms, stretching away at 4 this morning, throwing slabs of dough onto floured surfaces and neatly rolling spirals into buttered trays. Art and labour, life and food: Home takes on a more succinct meaning with the smell of baking bread. Away from home and breathing the scent deeply, I walk with purposeless certainty, watching the streets as I pass through them.