On the fourth or fifth morning she caught me watching. She must have clocked me days before, the strange linen woman who lingered. And instead of the polite French wall I expected, she jerked her chin, once, toward the back. Come. I did not understand at first that she meant it. She meant it. She let me stand in the doorway of the back room while she worked, not to help, God knows I'd have ruined a tray, just to watch up close.
She narrated a little, in French too fast for me, of which I caught maybe a third. And the third I caught was not really instruction anyway. It was philosophy disguised as instruction, the way the best of it always is. The dough tells you, she said, or something like it. You do not tell the dough. You put your hand on it and it tells you if it is ready, if it has had enough time, if it is too warm, and your whole job is to learn to listen to a thing that cannot speak.
On écoute. You listen. She pressed a finger into a proofing loaf to show me, the dent filling back slowly, not too fast, not too slow. She looked at me to see if I understood, and I did. I understood it in a place deeper than my bad French, because she was describing the exact opposite of the life I had fled: a life of listening instead of driving, of putting your hand on the living thing and letting it set the pace, of a mastery that was really just a very long and patient attention.