Opening a five pound bag of flour in the kitchen is always a moment of gentle peril.
Just tearing open the paper puffs a cloud of dust up into the air, twisting back down slowly onto whatever surface is below. Pouring it out into a canister is not something you can count on doing quickly, or without leaving arcs of white on the counter nearby. My grandmothers probably didn’t have much to do with five pound quantities; Their loaves of bread and pie crusts took them through that much flour in a week or less. I can go months sometimes without needing to buy a new one.
But the light-absorbing, drifting shadow of white powder in the kitchen window is a ghost of sorts, reminding me of aprons and rolling pins and dusted hands in family kitchens of Illinois and Iowa. So too, the outlines of where flour falls astray, and absent where it hit the mark, soon to become rising dough, baked biscuits, recipes sometimes remembered in part or in whole. Kitchen ghosts, wiped away by the sponge, still floating in my mind.
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