Feb 25, 2023

I’ve been making sourdough things since 1971 when I was given a sourdough starter at my bridal party. I took it off to my first apartment and quickly learned to make bread – yummy bread. I would make it in repurposed soup cans as it made lovely little round bread circles that worked great with sandwiches especially since at that time braunschweiger and colby cheese both came in tube shapes making a perfectly round sandwich.

This sourdough starter has followed me to

Michigan (Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti)

Maryland

South Carolina

Delaware

Ohio

Along the way, I’ve given others starts of my starter including my mother which was good thing because when I lived in Maryland, my mother-in-law was cleaning my refrigerator and threw it out as she thought it was disgusting. Fortunately, the next time I visited my mom in Michigan, I created a new one and took it back to Maryland. My favorite things are Honey Wheat bread, dinner rolls, rye bread and the most wonderful is pancakes!

I can also tell you that I have left it in the back of the refrigerator for up to 5 years and it still wakes up and is happy to bake. Now, I mostly make bread and treats around holidays and dinner events. With this schedule, the starter needs to be woke up about 3 days before you need it.

This all leads to the “Case of the Missing Sourdough Dinner Rolls” which began on Feb 21 when I woke it up. If you haven’t made sourdough, you start with a starter that you pour into a glass bowl and add an equal amount of warm water and flour. Mix it up knowing it will be lumpy, put a plate of wrap over the bowl and let it sit for a few days. The plate or wrap is to keep the fruit flies out and I have no idea how they find it in the dead of winter. I use a glass bowl so I can see it getting bubbly. I may stir it a couple times cause stirring is fun. After it has formed a “sponge” which is a technical term for “sourdough is ready”, I made the dough. Like most bread doughs there is a two-step rising process and the first one, I had ready to proof in my oven that has a proofing function. Sourdough is a slow rise, so this was ready to be punched down at 10PM on Friday.

Now, I took my half-century old 9X12 Pyrex glass baking pan which is one of the few wedding gifts I haven’t broken. I like glass as I can see when the rolls are nicely browned.  My pan holds 18 lovely little round balls that will rise to become dinner rolls. Typically, at holiday times, I will make this in the morning and let the rolls rise in the laundry room as it might take 4 or 5 hours – sourdough is not fast. This day, since it was already 10PM, I figured I rise them in the Garage since it was colder and having bread dough running down the walls in the laundry room is not the image I wanted and I do learn from experience. Knowing that we have had a mouse problem, I carefully wrapped the pan in “press-n-seal” plastic wrap. My daughter, a certified executive chef would be horrified to know I did this, but even the bushel of apples that I had stored in the same garage had only had two apples that had bites in them all winter.

Timing was that I’d get up at 6AM, let the dogs out and turn the oven to 375 as I’d have plenty of time to cook the rolls before I went to work.  After letting the dogs out and turning on the stove, I made the coffee and went to the garage to get the rolls.

THERE WERE NO ROLLS!!

The Pyrex pan was exactly where I left it, but the wrap was gone, too.

Did I make the rolls or just dreamed it?

In the kitchen sink were the two bowls I used and the dough hook waiting to be washed. Back out to the garage – nothing. Since it had snowed that night, I opened the garage door and saw no footprints anywhere. Walked around the house, nothing. Checked over the garage, the cubby spaces, nothing, and no signs of a large slab of dough being dragged away. I envisioned thousands of mice carrying off the dough, but how would they get out? The mouse hole is about the size of a quarter.  

Living in an old house, the squirrels in the winter get in the walls but that is in the old part of the house. Only once in 30 years has a squirrel found it’s way into the house and that was likely through the dog door. Now, the dog door was not open until I let the dogs out at 6AM and if a raccoon came in, there was still no way for the critter to get in the garage unless they are really tall and can open the door from the house to the garage.

On Sunday, I spent an hour walking around the entire outside looking for a way for a racoon, possum, squirrel to enter in vents, chimney, soffits and along the foundation. Nothing. And what animal would have been able to take the dough without breaking or moving the glass pan?    

When I left for work on Saturday morning knowing I was going to have to take my lunch hour at the farmers market to get replacement breads, I fully expected to see thousands of exploded mice and squirrels that had eaten the raw dough and when it hit their warm bellies, they would just explode. No, none there.

So, the mystery remains.

Who took the sourdough dinner rolls without disturbing the pan and leaving no footprints or trail?

Was it my husband sleep walking, but this was the equivalent of dough for 2 loaves of bread?

Was it someone who knew my car was unlocked and a button on my car will open the garage?

But how could that have happened, and my dogs not have heard?

Or maybe my house ghost stole them?  

Cloudy with a chance of dinner rolls?

Maybe this is the first miracle on my way to sainthood and the celestial sourdough I make has RISEN?

Caption: Mae Jemison, the first woman of color in space, gives a lecture on “Looking Up” at UW-Madison’s MLK Day observance in Madison, Wisconsin, Tuesday, January 21, 2020. RICK WOOD / MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL

2017 International Women’s Day Quote:

“Never be limited by other people’s limited imaginations” – Mae Carol Jamison

In 1992, returning from a flight on the Space Orbiter Endeavor, Dr. Jamison said about women and women of color:

“More women should demand to be involved. It’s our right. This is one area were can get in on the ground floor and possibly help to direct where space exploration will go in the future.”

Mae Carol Jamison was born in 1956 and is an American:

• engineer,
• physician,
• CEO,
• former NASA astronaut,
• author, 
• actress in an episode of Star Trek: The next Generation and a
• dancer.

She has been inducted in the national Women’s Hall of Fame and in international Space Hall of Fame. Did I mention she was the first black women to venture into space?

Dancing in Space: Mission Specialist Mae Jemison poses in Spacelab-Japan, 1992. (National Archives Identifier 22725970)

From kindergarten forward she told teachers she wanted to be a scientist and they channeled her to nursing. She began studying dance at 8, entered high school at 12 and joined the cheerleading team and Modern Dance Club. She learned ballet, jazz, modern dance and she aspired to be a dancer. At 16, she was off to Stanford where she was head to the Black Students Union and choreographed musical theater productions.

During her senior year in college she was still struggling with medial school or doctor. So, she got a B.S. in chemical engineering and a B. A in African and African-American studies. . Her mother helped her clarifying her career path by telling her: “You can always dance if you’re a doctor, but you can’t doctor if you’re a dancer.” And yes, she has a dance studio in her home.

When asked by a 12 year old girl she told CNN:

“She asked, How did being a dancer help you be an astronaut? Because dancers have to be very disciplined. You have to practice all the time. You have to constantly rehearse and pay attention to the people around you. You have to memorize complicated structures and scenarios. You have to be pretty thick-skinned as well because you have to be able to take criticism and apply it. All of those things are valuable.”

Dr. Jamison is one of the most remarkable women I have read about recently. She spends her time giving back and encouraging other your woman to pursue their dreams. The list of her accomplishments/honors/publications is long and best viewed on her Wikipedia page. 

In 2017, LEGO released the “Women of NASA” set, with minifigures of Jemison, Margaret Hamilton, Sally Ride, and Nancy Grace Roman.

Other places to learn about her are:

• Mae Jemison: Dancing to Space – Freshly Feminist ›
• https://www.dancemagazine.com/mae-jemison-dance-2639198565.html
• Mae Jemison: The Cosmic Dance – YouTube ›
• Five facts about Mae Jemison, doctor, dancer, and the first woman of … ›
• https://newblacknarrative.wordpress.com/2016/04/20/mae-c-jemison/

Rosalie Edge posing with one of the hawks she spent her life protecting – University of Connecticut

Rosalie Edge (1877-1965)  born Mabel Rosalie Barrow in New York City a wealthy socialite became a dedicated suffragist and after the passage of the 19^th amendment, she joined other bird watchers in Central Park and found a new cause that became her life’s work.  When reading about the wholesale killing of 70,000 bald eagles in the Alaskan territory, she became a conservation activist and later took on the National Audubon Society. In 1934 she ended the slaughter of hawks and eagles on a ridge in the Appalachian Mountains in Pennsylvania by buying the property and turning it into a sanctuary that still exits today https://www.hawkmountain.org/ .

Image – EcoTopia.org

 She influenced the founders of the Wilderness Society, The Nature Conservancy and the Environmental Defense Fund. In the 1960s, Hawk Mountain Sanctuary provided the author and scientist, Rachel Carson, with the migration data that enabled her to link the decline in the juvenile raptor population to DDT for her book, Silent Spring. She led national grassroots campaigns to create Olympic National Park and Kings Canyon National Park. In 1940 she lobbied Congress to purchase 8,000 acres of old growth sugar pines on the perimeter of Yosemite destined for logging.

 Ms Edge was one of the first people to sound the alarm that “it was every person’s civic duty to protect nature.” In the past, conservation was only about preserving species that had quantifiable economic value. Projecting all species was a dramatic shift as little knowledge existed that quantified the value of even the smallest species in the world.

 In 1948, the New Yorker described her as “the only honest, unselfish, indomitable hellcat in the history of conservation” (New Yorker, April 17, 1948).

http://ecotopia.org/ecology-hall-of-fame/rosalie-edge/biography/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalie_Edge

https://www.hcn.org/issues/41.12/conservations-first-lady

Courtesy of American Revolutionary – from an interview with NPR

Dr. Grace Lee Boggs (1915-2015) was born in Providence RI above her father’s restaurant, her mother, Yin Lan Ng, role modeled what it was to be a feminist. Boggs went to college at Barnard and then received her Ph. D. in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College.  She faced discrimination in the work force not just because she was a woman but also because of her Chinese heritage. In the 1940s, she took a low-paying job at the University of Chicago’s Philosophy Library. During this time, she began the her life’s work of activism, an activist focus on the struggles in the African-American Community.

In 1953, she married James Boggs, a black auto worker and political activist and they furthered their work in Detroit. Together, they tackled labor relations, civil rights, feminism, Black Power, Asian Americans, and the environment. She was active in the Black Power movement alongside Malcolm X and later became devoted to Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance.

Image – Boggs Education Center – Jimmy & Grace

In 2009, she was inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame. She is the author of many books with her husband and she died after her 100th birthday. Her autobiography, written in 1998, Living for Change and her re-released “The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century” are still available and of value in today’s times. She founded food co-ops, youth groups and wrote columns for the Michigan Citizen where she wrote a weekly column until 2013.  She never stopped, in 2012 she gave a lecture at the University of California Berkeley with the activist, Angela Davis.

Scholar Karín Aguilar-San Juan describes one aspect of Boggs’ activism: “Although she believes that racial and gender inequality will always demand struggle, Grace remains adamant that civil- rights- based activism will not lead to the far-reaching changes in society that a higher state of human evolution requires.” She goes on to explain that Boggs’ “political path” has been “guided by her study of global and historical change, hand- in- hand with daily participation in and observation of the struggles of people at the grassroots level.” –Frontiers Journal 2015.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Lee_Boggs

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/06/27/417175523/grace-lee-boggs-activist-and-american-revolutionary-turns-100

Jessie Morgan Kirkby – 1961 – Howe St Lansing Michigan

Women’s History Month is a time to not only celebrate the achievements and accomplishments of women but to learn about women that have been forgotten. As a kid, I often wondered things like “who invented the baby bottle?” as I was always thinking I could invent something. What I learned was that often inventions that were created by women were made out of necessity and need and not remarked but passed on from generation to generation.  The proverb “Necessity is the Mother of Invention” dates back to Plato.

My grandmother, Jessie Morgan Kirkby, taught me much about sewing, manners, life and gardening including, “plant your peas by the dark of the moon in March if you can work the ground.” If you live in Ohio or Michigan that would be March 13, 2021. For years, I thought this was something magical and I would go out and crawl around in the dark with a flash light planting my seeds. Grandma being long gone, couldn’t tell me that I could do it in the daytime. But, the science is if you plant your seeds by the dark of the moon, when they sprout, which with peas it will be about 2 weeks later, they will get more light from the spring moonlight. I learned that in a farming class I took in my 30’s. 

The knowledge of our past mothers, whether biological or mentored, is given freely and often the “why” gets lost but the success remains. This month, I plan to find women that have made a difference that are often forgotten and also some that we all need to follow and bring their story to life as they are changing the world we live in for good.

If you are in the Toledo area and with spring coming, I suggest you meet some of these women in our area. The Women’s History Month committee put together 4 walking tours where you can download the story and wander our streets meet women you may not know about or you may know and didn’t know the connection to Toledo.  There is no direct link, but if you scroll down at Women’s History Month, you’ll find the link to the 4 downloads.

Catherine Coleman Flowers

Catherine Coleman Flowers is a MacArthur fellow who has come to the attention of Washington and will be on the Task Force on Climate Change.   She is the founder of the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise (ACRE)  and as a author of Waste: One Women’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret. where she works to address the problem of unequal water sanitation in rural communities in the US.  In 2019, she testified to Congress about the failure of Alabama to provide affordable and effective septic systems to residents and called on policy makers to make meaningful investments at local, state and federal levels.  The resource she created with Columbia Law School is appropriately called, “Flushed and Forgotten“. 

Flowers’ work builds partnerships with elected officials, regional non-profits and federal law makers including the US Congress, EPA and CDC. She has educated people on how unsafe water and raw sewage are not just problematic because they cause disease (we have collectively as humans known this for thousands of years) but disease and inadequate resources reinforce generational poverty. 

She comes from a family of activists and by the age of 16, in the early 70s she became a Robert Kennedy Fellow and worked to rid her high school of the principal and superintendent that were complicit if not directly involved in sexual trafficking of black girls and one that was killed. 

After graduating from college, she was a teacher in both Detroit and Washington D.C. and saw the need for civil rights first hand. Then she had a mind changing experience when she saw the movie “Inconvenient Truth”  and found herself moving back to Alabama in 2000 to begin community work in her hometown on infrastructure and nonexistent and improper wastewater management systems. 

When responding to her recent appointment to Biden’s Climate Task Force of which there are only 8 people and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is the chair, she told Sienna Zuco;

“I stand on a lot of shoulders. And I’d probably take up this entire interview just naming people who have been instrumental in influencing me from my childhood even through now,. I think what I developed from my parents was a sense of what is morally right and a sense of giving a voice to people that do not have the access, or the privilege themselves,”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Coleman_Flowers

https://www.humanrightscolumbia.org/sites/default/files/Flushed%20and%20Forgotten%20-%20FINAL%20%281%29.pdf

Born Country but Raised an Activist: Catherine Coleman Flowers of the Biden Climate Task Force Uncovers “America’s Dirty Secret” in “Bloody Lowndes,” Alabama