The Bread Bond

Those of you who have been reading my blog for awhile will recall my bread pledge a few years back (2010, actually) when, as part of Earth Day celebrations, I pledged to make all of our family's bread products for 40 days. It was a transformative experience. I gave a talk about it at church and also posted most of my recipes (search my blog for "bread pledge" or "rise up.")  I then posted a wrap-up.  Two interesting things happened during the pledge:  it brought my church community together as they rallied to teach me how to bake and shared their recipes with me.  And I was given a highly coincidental, perhaps miraculous, compilation of bread recipes--BREAD of all things, not just a cookbook--which was, unbeknownst to the person who gave it to me, compiled by the person who lived in this house in the 1950s!!

Well, the bread story continues.  Because yesterday, as the attic cleaners were carting junk out of the attic, I spotted a dirty only plank, with this sign screwed on it:

It had to be bread!

I Googled it and found that this dirty, grimy sign, when cleaned (and that's not rust but dirt!) sells for almost $500 on eBay!  It's porcelain on steel, dating to the around the 1930s, or about a decade after our house was built.  Bond Bread, founded in 1911 by the General Baking Company, was made by a conglomeration of bakeries in, at its height, 26 states, and was famous for its baked goods, such as streusel-topped cinnamon swirl bread and "bridge cookies" (they even held a contest to find the best homemade recipe!).  It was very popular, supporting radio programs and eventually Hopalong Cassidy's show (did you know I used to live on Cassidy Place and had a cat named Hopalong!  The coincidences multiply!).    Something like Pepperidge Farms, I think.  Anyway, the bakeries were dominant until grocery stores added their own bakeries; I think the company shuttered in 1972.

I can only guess that it's screwed onto what was once a portion of fence that was later used as flooring in our attic, where the sign stayed protected for half a century or so until I saw the attic cleaners carting it away to the junk pile of 50+ bags of insulation and garbage.  It didn't take a split second for me to know that I wanted to keep that sign, which is now safe in the garage until we can figure out how to get it off the planks.

We won't be selling it, even at that price.  I think it's some kind of lucky bread talisman so it will be going into our kitchen as soon as possible.  Sis and Bud were intrigued, though they don't recall the Bread Pledge (they were only 4 1/2 years old), and they've asked me to take up the homemade bread pledge again.

See, it's magic is working already.

The Belfry is Clean

Remember our bats?

We have been visited at least three times.  The first time, our dearly beloved Morgan cat alerted us to the existence of the winged creature in our bedroom when he started running like a crazy cat all over the bed.  We turned on the light--a bat!  It was the middle of the night, but we managed to get someone in pest control on the phone to advise us to trap it in a cardboard box against a flat surface.  And brave Mama did (spiders, she won't do; bats, no problem.)  In truth, we were more worried that the cat would get it and get rabies or something, so we locked him out of the room--he desperately beat at the door, no doubt sure he was much better qualified to catch the thing.

The second bat visit was much the same, but I think Morgan was no longer with us by then.  Again, Mama trapped and released it.

The third bat was last year.  We never saw it, only I heard it flapping and saw a shadow of something overhead in the air conditioner return as I was walking to the bathroom around 10 pm one night.  Ugh.  We figured the first bat got in when we had the chimney fixed; the second when we re-roofed.  But we don't know how the third got in.

We had the bat excluders out soon after that to seal the attic.  Did you know a bat can squeeze anywhere the tip of a pencil will fit?  Just like a mouse.  They were very humane excluders--they have to be because there are laws protecting bats and their young.  No bats were harmed in the process, well, if you don't count becoming homeless.

And so we needed the attic cleaned once the bats were excluded, but with Mama's surgery and all, last summer turned out to be too overwhelming.  And so they attic cleaners came this week.  Apparently, there wasn't a lot of guano--there never was a colony in our attic, just a few random bats.  In fact, most of the mess was from the roofers who replaced our roof and left all their detritus in the rafters as well as the previous occupants who abandoned window screens, old doors, a couple of huge wooden ladders, and tons of planking up there.  So, the attic people cleaned it all up, sprayed anti-microbial stuff, and even replaced the very old insulation.  Now maybe our roof won't be the first on the block to lose its snow cover!  And I won't have to think I live under that bridge in Austin with the millions of bats.

There was one wonderful thing they found in the attic, but that's my next post.