Baked With Love

Last weekend, my youngest niece, Ansley, came through our laundry room door carrying a freshly baked loaf of sourdough bread, made with her own two hands, just for us. We didn’t waste a minute. We gathered around the kitchen island, tore into that loaf, slathered on some butter, and stood together talking about the flavor, the texture, that glorious crust, and the whole beautiful process of coaxing dough into something satisfying and delicious. Ansley even tucked a small container of starter into the refrigerator for us with some sketchy instructions, so we could attempt to make bread ourselves this week. We gave it a go, and our loaf was edible, but it paled in comparison to her masterpiece.

Twenty-nine-year-old Ansley has been on quite the culinary journey lately, and bread baking has become her forte—a gift she is good at. A few weeks back at Easter, she showed up to my Mom’s home in Ohoopee with a baking dish of homemade cinnamon rolls made from her sourdough starter—Lord have mercy! Those rolls were pure heaven—soft, sweet, and made with love. They were huge, and I ate half of one of her doughy delicacies with coffee the following morning, making all sorts of guttural exclamations. “Mmm. It’s so good,” I kept saying over and over again.

Watching Ansley walk through a door with something she baked got me thinking about how women have been doing exactly that for hundreds of years. Long before grocery stores, doorbells, cooking shows, and casserole dishes with someone’s name taped to the bottom in masking tape, women were pulling things from their ovens with mitts and carrying them across cotton fields, down dirt roads, and up front porch steps to the people they loved and cared about. We do it when somebody passes away. We do it when a new baby arrives. We do it when a neighbor moves in—a welcome wagon kind of gesture. We carry food to folks when illness settles into a house. It’s arguably the oldest love language there is.

I think back to the 1990s, when my grandmother, Ona Jarrard Jarriel, was still living in her farmhouse out in Tattnall County. My husband and I would make the two-hour drive to see her as often as we could, and we almost always stopped in Vidalia at Shoney’s to pick up one of their big strawberry pies (the ones with the giant strawberries set in sweet ruby-red glaze). I didn’t bake it myself, but I wasn’t about to walk into Grandmother’s house empty-handed. We’d settle in at her big kitchen table, cut into that pie, and wash it down with coffee or a tall glass of cold milk. Simple—and perfect—as that.

When my father, Herman Lanier, died back in 1992, our house filled up with food before we even knew what had happened. When my husband’s father passed away in 2009, an elderly neighbor drove up our driveway and handed me a homemade pound cake. She didn’t even get out of her car—just handed me the cake through the driver’s side continued from page

window and said, “We are sorry for your loss.” That quiet gesture touched our hearts more than words ever could, and her pound cake brought us a moment of peace amid the chaos that ensued in the wake of George Nagle’s death.

The same miracle came again in May 2022, when my stepfather, Johnny Collins, left us. Friends, family, and neighbors packed my mother’s kitchen so full that grief was the only thing we had to carry.

Food is comfort. Homemade food is a blessing. And Ansley, honey, keep on baking!