Read Stones for Bread for Free Online Page A

please, please, let her go. Please, Liesl.”
    “Um, go where?”
    “To the farm. For the fiber tour.”
    “The what?”
    “It’s this thing where people involved in the artisan fiber industry open their farms and businesses to the public to learn more about it,” Seamus says. “I’m sure it wouldn’t interest you. I’m sorry for Cecelia’s exuberance.”
    “She’d like it, Daddy. We get to pet sheep and see alpacas and sometimes there’s cotton candy too. If she wants to go, can she? Please, please, please?”
    He narrowed his eyes at the girl in that way parents do when theirchildren force them into an awkward corner and they can’t escape without either looking like a fool or breaking their little ones’ hearts. As soon as the expression comes, however, it softens. He itches his beard and the crumb falls away. “Of course she can. If she wants to, she can.”
    Cecelia turns her face to me. It shines with hopefulness, and that part of me that I don’t want to exist, the one that needs people, the one that comes awake on these Sundays, drinks in her light. And it says to me, More .
    “Sure,” I say. “Why not?”

    Yeast . The word comes to us through Old English, from the Indo-European root yes— meaning boil, foam, bubble. It does all those things, and more. And would it not be the Egyptians, who construct the largest, most sophisticated buildings in the land, to also harness the tiniest microbe?
    Of course, they know nothing of yeast. To them, it is magic.
    They are called the bread eaters . “Dough they knead with their feet, but clay with their hands,” Herodotus wrote with derision. The Egyptians do not care. They understand their bread is from the gods, for king and peasant alike. They invent ovens to bake this new, breath-filled dough because it cannot be cooked like the flat breads they know first. They construct clay vessels to hold it. They watch it rise in the heat. They add butter and eggs and honey and coriander, and save soured dough from one batch to add to the next. They eat.
    They live.
    It becomes a symbol of morality; a beggar is never to be denied bread. It becomes the cornerstone of their society, their currency. The poor are paid three loaves a day, the temple priests nine hundred fine wheat breads a year. Pharaohs have an abundance for this life and the next.
    But the ancient bakers are not only magicians. They are artists, creating shapes limited only by imagination. Spirals and cones and shells. Fish and birds and pyramids. Does each shape have significance, each flavor its own power? Perhaps. Or perhaps even the ancients created only to create, celebrating beauty for beauty’s sake.
    And what is lovelier than warm bread?

    Seamus insists on taking his truck, so I struggle into the front seat after Cecelia. She wriggles into the center, sticks her hand deep into the cushion to fish out the belt. “Here’s one. And here’s two,” she says, metal fasteners clanging. She clicks the seat belt into place and pulls the end.
    “Not tight enough,” Seamus says. He gives the strap another tug.
    “I can’t breathe.”
    “Any looser and you’ll slip out.”
    She squirms and tugs at her waist. “Daddy.”
    “Okay, okay,” he says, “just a little.” He unlatches the belt, pretends to lengthen it, and buckles her in again. “Better?”
    She fills her belly with a deep gulp of air. Exhales. Nods. “Much.”
    Seamus meets my eye, the thinnest smile at one corner of his mouth. He starts the truck; it wheezes like an old man, emphysema in the exhaust. Cecelia drapes her legs on my side of the gearshift; they don’t stop moving, her sandaled feet constantly scraping up against my leg. Dirt smudges my pants. I try not to reach down and rub it away.
    They’re my favorite pair.
    The truck rattles around us. Conversing is an effort, the words vibrating into pieces difficult to hear. Seamus and I try to exchange a few polite sentences, but after a few minutes we fall into a