Wonder . . . . Bread?

Dear Blog Reader:

I hope this finds you doing well. I am fine. Sitting here during the evening in a weekly ritual that I have grown to love and look forward to. We are on the cusp of the best blogging time of the year. I have been cutting wood on the weekends since Labor Day weekend. Now 10 weeks later, I am one weekend away from putting this puppy to bed for the long winter's nap. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. The 6 to 7 hours devoted to cutting wood a weekend has made getting the blog done in a timely fashion a bit difficult from time to time. But starting the weekend of December 17, I will be sitting in pajamas looking out the window writing you.

A bicycling milestone this week; I took my first below freezing bike ride. I managed to dress warm enough to stay pretty comfortable. My feet keep getting very cold. I have tried wool socks and multi-socks still I end up with ice cubes attached to my ankles. One of my biking magazines suggests putting bread sacks over your socks and under your shoes. I hear that bread has amazing insulative properties. However, I haven't solved the loaf of bread inside of my shoes part yet.  I know. You’re supposed to empty the bread out of the bag before you put it on your feet. Just foolin. I wasn't born yesterday.

In fact, when I heard of the bread bag solution, I was transported to the 70's when we first utilized bread bags. Growing up on a farm, we were always looking for the boot solution. The landscape was defined muddle puddles and cow poop from mid-November through mid-April. The challenge was how do you keep the feet dry and clean against the alchemy that is found in the barnyard during those cold and nasty months. I don't know what my forbearers wore on their feet through the four dreary months of late fall through winter, but thanks to injected molding technology, we were the proud beneficiaries of these hard plastic boots that unfortunately had the insulative properties of aluminum. Cold, cold, cold.

Thankfully, America's finest scientists had kids who kept whining about cold their feet, and they came out with cold boots 2.0. The solution was gluing a fake fur lining inside of the boot. Getting those boots down off of the Tractor Supply Boot Shelf, we knew that we had found the Holy Grail for our frostbitten toes. We rushed home and slid our feet into that soft, luxurious, fake, polyester, fur. Our toes were no longer solid ice. In fact, they became warm and toasty; which is how, like is so often the case, our salvation became our downfall.

Remember, one of the goals of our boots was to keep our feet dry. That meant no water in. It also meant no water out. After about an hour in the comfy confines of our fake fur lined boots, our sweaty little feet would soak through our socks and the lining of our boots allowing the cold to creep in and freeze the once warm cockles of our hearts.

 "Come on son. You need to get the calves fed."

"But dad, I can't feel my feet."

"Ah come on son. I just bought you those nice luxurious warm fake fur boots."

"Dad! I CAN'T FEEEEEEEEEL my FEEEEEEEEET."

"Son get out there and feed those calves now or I'll give you something you can feel."

I suppose President Obama is correct when he said that Americans are getting soft. You don't see many kids these days missing one or two toes after having them being frostbit while sitting in a dank and dirty boot cave while their owner hobbled around feeding the calves on a late January night. I do think that the President would have more credibility if he wouldn't have called me soft right after spending his summer vacation at Martha's Vineyard.

So enter our unlikely hero the bread sack. I suppose one of our friends had a mom or dad that had an aptitude for thermo-dynamics, or maybe we stumbled upon the solution through trial and error and spurred on by the knowledge that we only had 10 toes to give to science. The solution; an absorbent cotton sock, the bread sack, and a good wool sock stuffed into a boot that is one size larger than you usually wore. With that bit of alchemy, our problems were solved.

For a 10 year old, it truly was magic and not the laws of thermo-dynamics that saved our toes. It was the red, blue and yellow dots on those Wonderbread bags. No wonder that once the proper blend was found of cotton, plastic, and wool was found, we kept the combination together for weeks at a time. Until, after smelling a foul odor coming from the utility room, mom would contribute to the softening of America by snagging the offensive socks with tongs, dismantling our coldness force fields and forcing us to eat two loaves of bread and starting all over again.

So the road is clear to toasty toed bike riding. I just hope that Brownberry's double fiber bread sacks work as well as Wonderbread sacks.

Toasty toes and the joy that double fiber bread brings.

Take care

Roger