My friend Maureen hunts down old Fine Gardening magazines, reads them over afternoon tea, and then sends them my way. (I send her our New Yorkers.) I got a bunch on Friday afternoon and was poking through one from about 2000. There, in the Northwest section, was an article on Cracked Pots, an arts fair full of garden objects made from recycled materials. One photo caught my eye. The two pieces looked…familiar. Like I had just seen one and helped move the other, back in the day. I looked closer. It was a stool and an insect, both made by my friend Anne Hart. The insect did not sell that day and it now sits on my front steps. Her name was not in the article; I wonder if her work would have sold better if it was.
When I was in grad school in Boston, I had a job at a Jewish bakery in Newton, Massachusetts, where we lived. It was a small place—served coffee to commuters in the morning, bagels and cream cheese to the high school students from down the street at lunch, and loaves of rye and challah to the Jewish mothers who came in during the day. I started in September, right before Rosh Hashanah. Women called all day, ordering bread for the holidays. “I want three round challies,” they would say, “two plain and one raisin.” “Challie?” I asked one of the people I worked with. “Challah,” they explained. All righty, I thought. Challie.
When I moved to Portland, I called the loaf “challie.” “Challah,” my west coast Jewish roommate corrected me. No pet names here. Last night, I made a rather huge braided challah with fig paste rolled in for a potluck. My friend Leah, from Brookline—right next door to Newton—reached for a piece. “I want some of the challie,” she smiled.
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