VIII. Bread
When we’d break the earth for the first time with the plow in springtime, we’d lay a slice of bread on the first piece of ground to be plowed. It goes without saying it wasn’t just a regular slice like you cut to eat with a glass of milk or a pickled cucumber, or on its own, without anything. It had to have been cut from a new loaf on Christmas Eve.
Mother would already have set the table for the Christmas Eve dinner without meat. Father would light the lantern, take the ladder from the hallway, and go fetch a loaf from the barn, because we kept our bread on the roof beams in the barn. There was a fresh draft in there so it didn’t go moldy, and it was high up. It was hard to get to without a ladder. We tried sometimes, me and Michał, we’d attempt to shimmy up the post the middle of the beam rested on, but we never managed it, and the ladder always stood out in the hallway.
There was żurek soup with buckwheat, noodles and poppy seed, and pierogies stuffed with cabbage, but we waited for mother to cut the bread like that was the most special dish. And dinner would start with the bread. Mother would rest the loaf against her stomach, she’d make the sign of the cross over it with the knife, she’d first cut a big slice that was going to be for the earth in the spring, then just a regular slice for each of us, according to our place in the family, first for grandfather, then grandmother while she was still alive, then father, us boys, and for herself last of all. Father would get the lantern again and put the first slice in the attic, he’d stick it way up high on a rafter beneath the thatch, usually in the darkest place. And there the slice of bread would wait for the spring like a sleeping pigeon.