Baking Through a Plague
The author and her mother in 1983. Late on a golden afternoon in August 1979, my dad turned a twenty-six-foot rental truck onto an unpaved driveway lined with ponderosa pines. Road dust billowed and shimmered. Inside the truck were the remains of our San Francisco life: artwork and easels, baking equipment, baby toys, the wall-sized dance mirrors my dad had scavenged from a ballet school—all hastily packed.
Only days before, my parents were at the helm of Sticky Fingers Brownies in San Francisco, a massive underground bakery distributing ten thousand marijuana brownies per month. Selling any amount of weed was a felony. They’d skated by for three years, but then my mom started having nightmares about police barging in. My dad dreamed of earthquakes and tidal waves. They argued about what to do, but both sensed a looming catastrophe. When their weekly I Ching consultations turned ominous, my parents shuttered their lucrative bakery in a panic and moved three hours north to Willits, California with me in tow.
I was just a toddler, too little to remember this moment, but my parents have filled me in on the details. When the little farmhouse emerged between oak trees, my dad crowed, “Home sweet home!” failing to notice a gigantic tree root hiding a deep pothole. The sound of glass breaking in the truck shocked us all into silence. Then I began to wail.
I doubt there’s a
