When I was growing up, homemade sourdough was a staple in my family's rural Alaskan household. School lunches were on sourdough bread; Friday-night pizza was on sourdough crust, and Sunday-morning pancakes or waffles were sourdough.

Decades on, the memories are still tangible: the radiant heat and sweet-acrid smell of burning pine and birch; the stiff, floury texture of the sourdough and the clunk of the heavy rolling pin as I helped my mother measure sourdough from the old yellow pitcher in the kitchen, add flour and sugar, and meticulously roll it until a pizza dough emerged; the tang of wild blueberries or mild sweetness of fireweed or rosehip on steaming hot pancakes.

My family never did anything the easy way. Rather than living in town, we lived an hour outside it, in a rustic log home nestled at the bank of a river that sometimes liked to flood its banks in spring. Cold, dark winters were heated with wood-burning stoves from logs harvested and split with our own sweat equity through summer. Homemade sourdough was topped in tomatoes or pesto made from garden-harvested herbs or syrups or jams made after forays into the nearby woods.

I’ll always associate sourdough with the cold, brittle winter mornings and carefree summer evenings of a childhood that, looking back, I don’t know that I always fully appreciated. I share this story because many things – the pandemic, sheer distance and geography, ever-busy lives – have kept me from home for far too long.

This loaf of bread – such a wonderful and powerful gesture of friendship – brought back so many memories for me. When times are difficult and our lives are thrown from their normal routines, as they have been this past year, even something as simple as a (symbolically) shared meal is meaningful. If there’s one thing I hope we carry with us beyond this year, it’s that we learn to stop and embrace simple acts of kindness, fond memories, and quiet little friendships.