There's Something Gratifying About Slicing Bread

     I bought some bread the other day at Publix. A loaf of brown-topped and soft "English Muffin" bread.
     How the store can keep this in stock is a mystery to me, because I would buy every loaf they had if I knew I could keep it fresh.
     The only thing I didn't know was that it wasn't pre-sliced.
     Which was - and is - ultimately one of the best things about it.
     Let me begin by saying, I'm not a big eater of bread. Never did like it much. Growing up, we had the Wonder bread, because white bread was best for BLT's and peanut butter sammiches. And, it was 50-cents a loaf, and even cheaper if you went to the day-old bread store, which Mom did every week.
The chickens got most of my sammich....and they loved Wonder bread, so it was an even trade, because they provided me endless hours of true fascination.
     Anyway, as I was looking through my knife drawer for a bread knife, which I seemed to have sent off to someone else via a thrift store (because who needs to slice bread anymore?), I pondered how I was to get even slices with my trust filet knife. In the end, it didn't matter, because the is one of the true satisfactions of unsliced bread. I learned this. And another thing I learned: how wonderfully pioneer it makes a woman feel to slice a loaf of bread.
     As women, most, if not all, of us have that weird little buried gene that makes us feel like we've ground the wheat into flour ourselves, that we have made the butter and that we have baked this loaf of bread in a wood-fired stove - when we slice a loaf of bread ourselves. It makes us feel all Little House on the Prairie. It makes us feel we have accomplished a feat not unlike building a great pyramid or padding a canoe straight down the Amazon with nary the loss of an eyelash. It feeds the inner soul to the depth of the ocean just to slice a loaf of baked bread. It is amazing. I just wanted to run out and plant seeds and feed chickens. I wanted to get up early to milk cows. I was instantly transformed into a bonnet-wearing, calico-dressed 1890s-oppressed female of the species waiting for Trapper Dan to come home from a long trek in the winter snow.
     Well, maybe not that tangled up in self-sufficiency, but I sure liked it.
     So now, I'm hooked on unsliced bread. I think I'll go cut a hunk right now.