The Goal Is to Not Cut Myself
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re still in Dinan, taking long walks by the river and long drives in the Breton countryside.
The Goal Is to Not Cut Myself
Last Saturday, we went to a particularly wonderful market in Rennes, the capital of the Brittany region. I had read good things about Rennes, and what we saw of it was very appealing, with slightly more of a city vibe than our little village of Dinan, but it started raining, so we hustled back toward the car with our bags full of market produce.
But right next to the parking deck was a bakery that I had spied when we arrived, so of course we had to pop in to suss it out. We bought a kouign amann to compare with the one we had bought at the market, and a little bag of chouquettes for the drive home, and at the last second, I asked for half a loaf of the beautifully crusty seeded sourdough bread.The woman behind the counter handed me the little bag that contained the chouquettes and the pastry, which I handed to Lee, and then she handed over the (very large) half loaf of bread. As-is. She just picked it up off the bread shelf and handed it to me, explaining that it would keep for at least three days if I wrapped it in a towel, because of the sourdough.
It was a little awkward—I didn’t want to walk out into the rain carrying an unwrapped chunk of bread—so I put it in the bag with our market veggies. But it was also kind of an interesting way to interact with bread. There was something kind of intimate about the way she so casually picked it up and handed it to me. She was clearly proud of the quality of the bread, but there was nothing reverential in her pride. Bread is woven into the fabric of daily life in France—it’s always there, but rarely in the foreground. I like that about France.
We drove back to Dinan, and I made lunch. After we ate and cleaned up, I got out the bread knife so I could slice the slab of bread and put it in the freezer (having lived most of my life in the humid south, I can’t shake my conviction that bread lasts better in the freezer rather than on the counter).
About halfway through the slicing, I commented out loud that my goal, at that point, was to not cut myself. I even repeated it, when Lee asked what I was mumbling about.
You see where this is going, right? Not ninety seconds later, as I was grappling with the thick crust near the heel of the loaf, the wicked serrated bread knife bounced off the bread and sliced the crap out of my index finger and thumb.
When the finger was still bleeding forty minutes later, we went to the local emergency room to see if it needed stitches. [I hope you never need to know, but just in case, the French word for stitches is sutures. Not to hard to figure out.]
Two nurses cleaned the wound on my finger (I had already put a bandaid on the smaller thumb cut) and examined it, then called in a senior nurse for another opinion. They finally agreed that no stitches were necessary, put on some steri-strips, and sent me on my way with some extra strips for later. The senior nurse, as she was leaving the room, looked back at me and asked, “Was it bread you were cutting?”
Of course it was bread.
At the front desk, when I asked how much I owed, the intake person said, “You didn’t see a doctor, did you?” I said I had not, and she said there was no charge.
We were in and out in twenty minutes, on a Saturday afternoon. No charge.
Later that afternoon I walked to the pharmacy to buy some Tylenol. It started to rain again, and as the cobbles got slick, I opened my mouth to mumble ‘the goal is to not fall.’
I thought better of it, and snatched those words back before they got out.
Take care,
Lisa
P.S. Thanks for reading, and feel free to share. If you have feedback, I’d love to hear it. And if someone forwarded this to you, thank them for me, and go to https://bookwoman.com/ to subscribe.