Sonya Cheney

Writer. Witch. Creatrix.

before it was cool.

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In November, I started watching Jenna Fischer’s bread baking videos on Instagram, which lead me to ordering Bonnie Ohara’s Bread Baking for Beginners—previously mentioned in my eight-hour no-knead bread post—and diving headfirst into the world of bread baking.

I’d been making bread for a while before then: a bulgur wheat recipe that I got in college and still love; the occasional homemade pizza; one cinnamon-raisin loaf so successful that our dog ate all but one slice in a single go. I love bread (who doesn’t?), and in my years-long effort to become a self-reliant homesteader, bread became one of the skills being added to my repertoire. It wasn’t until November, though, when that perfect book came into my life that my love of the loaf really started to blossom.

Then the pandemic hit, and now everyone and their brother seems to be making bread on Instagram, and I’m not going to lie—I feel a little less cool now.

I can’t begrudge anyone making the best of a bad situation and learning to fend for themselves even in this small way. Making bread is a cool skill and, like I said, who doesn’t love bread? Any time someone mentions to me, even in passing, that they want to learn to bake bread, it’s all I can do to stop myself from shoving a copy of Bread Baking for Beginners into their hands. I would gladly buy a copy for every person I know if I could afford it. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t that small part of me, some holdover from being a teenager no doubt, that gets a little disgruntled by the nineteenth photo of bread I scroll past on Instagram in one sitting. (Granted, one sitting could be quite a long time.)

It’s always been a part of my personality, this wanting to be seen as unique in some way or another, but the reality is that it’s near impossible to truly be unique. I might be the only Me in the world, but I’m not the only person who loves to bake, who loves to knit, who loves cats, has a son, is a witch, wears size six and a half shoes, or some combination of any of those traits. And the funny thing is that there are plenty of people who were, say, baking bread before I was and who I thought were cool for doing so—who’s to say I wasn’t that same person to someone else? Who’s to say I’m not still?

Being inside your own head and forgetting to explore other people’s perspectives can be detrimental in so many ways, big and small. We know that seeing the world at large from another person’s point of view can be helpful; that’s something we’re taught in elementary school. But we don’t always remember to think about how our own world, on a personal level, looks to someone else, unless it’s in a self-conscious way.

What if they don’t like what I’m doing?
What do they think of my outfit?
What if I’m too much or not enough?

I think it could be important to start thinking about the positive ways people can see us, the positive effects we can have on others even if we don’t know it’s happening.

Maybe someone will make their own version of this.
I wonder if anyone will have questions.
I’ll add some recommendations in case anyone wants to learn more about this.

The people I admire the most—specifically on Instagram, since that’s where I spend most of my time—are ones I consider cool because I learn from them. They inspire me to try new skills and hobbies, and they inspire me to get better, to do better, to stop worrying so much. If I was baking bread “before it was cool,” then maybe someone saw it, and it inspired them to bake their own. Or maybe it didn’t. But it shouldn’t be a competition either way. Too many things are competitive when they don’t need to be, and I shouldn’t turn bread into another one of those things for no reason other than my own ego. Like the people that I, even in the last year of my twenties, look up to, I need to just do my thing and fuck everything else.

I need to just let them bake bread.

currently, in quarantine.

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Life is so odd right now. I’m not saying anything new. Even to me, someone lucky enough to maintain something of the same daily routine as pre-isolation, life is odd. Dan is home all day every day, compared to previously leaving for work by 7am and getting home by 6:30pm. We’re in temporary housing as we wait to close on our new house—quarantine is a challenging time to buy and sell houses, let me tell you. And Finn and I can no longer take aimless trips to the bookstore, to Target, to Michaels to kill time during the days. He’s still not quite big enough to “play with,” so to walk around shops with him was such a great way to keep him amused and to keep us from getting tired of our surroundings. Now, we’re lucky if the weather is good enough to go sit outside because even that’s been off the walls lately.

Saturday, we woke up to snowfall. Sunday, we went on a hike. Mostly, though, my time has been spent knitting and watching Finn and reading and playing with Finn and watching BuzzFeed Unsolved videos.

Rinse, repeat.

I did finally switch to audiobook for my current read—Kendare Blake’s Three Dark Crowns—because I just can’t seem to tear myself from my knitting enough to focus on a book. This will be a problem once I finish the second book in the series because the library only has the first two available. Maybe, by then, I’ll be a little past my current knitting obsession. I go through phases, knitting a lot, reading a lot, writing a lot. Lately, I haven’t had it in me to write at all. I haven’t even journaled since before isolation began, which is absurd because this is exactly the kind of incident that journaling could help me to get through. And aside from that, shouldn’t I want to “chronicle this historical moment”? To be honest, not really. I’ve seen a lot of scrapbookers on Instagram talking about documenting this period and the potential for future relatives or others looking through their albums, and it’s an interesting idea, but I don’t do my journaling or scrapbooking for anyone but myself and maybe my immediate family (in the case of Finn’s baby book).

On the one hand, it’s been nice not to think, “I need to document this,” but I also wish I felt that desire to journal. Scrapbooking is more of a challenge in between houses, but I have my notebook and I have a pen. I just don’t have the interest at the moment. I’m not sure why not, and I know it’ll come back; I often go through these kinds of waves. For now, though, it’s been simple living in quarantine: baking bread, knitting, and appreciating nature as best we can.

I’m grateful that my life hasn’t been in total upheaval throughout this and I know I’m one of the lucky ones. I’ve tried to do what I can with my privilege and power: buying from small businesses (and avoiding Amazon as best I can), staying isolated and socially distancing, and being grateful that my child is too young to remember this even if he has to live through the aftereffects. There’s a constant undercurrent of worry to my days, as someone who feels deeply for so many; even if I’m unaffected in my day-to-day life, I worry about my friends and family, about the vulnerable populations, about how those in power are handling (or not) this entire situation. I worry about the people who don’t seem to understand what’s going on—or maybe they just don’t care—and how their actions can hurt others who are just trying to get through it all. It seems trite, but I just want everything and everyone to be okay.

pizza fridays.

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For a few months now I’ve been considering the ways I could save money in our household, and my two best ways so far have been in the form of making our own cold brew coffee and cutting down on takeout. Thanks to a combination of Kristin’s (rukristin) own Pizza Fridays and working my way through Bread Baking for Beginners, I’ve instituted Pizza Friday in our house, and I can’t recommend it enough to everyone who might be even slightly considering it.

One of my favorite things about the recipe is that it’s a no-knead dough, so it’s simple to put together every week. Plus, it makes two pizzas, so we have enough for almost the entire weekend–but in the unlikely event that we don’t want two pizzas, it’s just as easy to cut the recipe in half. All the recipes in the book are by weight, making them that much more accurate than volume-based recipes.

The best part, though, is the routine. I’m not one who has a strict routine each day—or even much of a loose routine to be honest, but that journey is for another post on another—but having that simple, consistent answer to, “What’s for dinner?” makes life a little bit easier, at least on Fridays. And if we do it right, then we never get bored because there are so many options for toppings. Sometimes we’ll do a little something special, but other times, like when it’s better to stay home as much as possible, then I’ll go through the possible toppings we already have in the house and see what we can come up with. After the first few weeks, in which we cycled through Hawaiian-bacon, chicken and mushroom, and a few ham and cheddar, I cobbled together a broccoli-cheddar pizza with some frozen chopped broccoli and leftover cheddar, but I also decided to take it up a notch:

Pan pizza.

I love pan pizza. I don’t eat it often because I never think of it as an option—and some places it’s not—but the King Arthur Flour Instagram posted about their pan pizza recipe a week or two ago, and that got me interested in trying it out. I didn’t use their recipe, though; I used my usual recipe and just baked it in my cast iron skillet instead of on our pizza pan, giving it about an extra ten to fifteen minutes to rise in the skillet before adding toppings. I’m still amazed at how well it turned out for a first try, and it will definitely be added to our rotation.

I’m not writing this with the belief that Pizza Friday is some big revelation. Plenty of people do this kind of thing already, whether with pizza or with any number of other foods. If I’m honest, I’m writing it for the pure reason that I find it so damn exciting to get to affordably eat pizza every week if I want to! And, oh, do I want to.

comfort in creation.

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If I’m being honest, my daily life hasn’t changed as much as so many others in the wake of the pandemic. I’ve never had much tendency to leave the house in the first place; even when I would be exceptionally bored and think, “Maybe I’ll just go to Barnes & Noble and browse for a little while,” I would inevitably find myself still at home and before I knew it the day would be over. The biggest changes have come in the form of Dan working from home for the foreseeable future and the constant unknown of what he’ll actually manage to come back with from the grocery store, not matter what I put on the list.

I’ve always been a homebody, and I’m okay with that. I’m one of the people all of the introvert/pandemic memes are referencing on Instagram. But even though I was made for a life at home all day, every day, I’ve still been on a roller coaster of discomfort and anxiety over the past couple of weeks. Some days I feel hopeful and confident; other days, I check the news. Sometimes, it just doesn’t feel worth it to stay informed.

Although I’m doing pretty much all of my usual stuff each day, the small, normal things have taken on even more meaning for me. Being able to bake my own bread (something an astounding number of people have started doing), knitting, even starting my small herb garden have all helped me get through each day and feel like I have some semblance of control and…not significance, exactly, but something like it.

In all my love for oddities and the macabre, I of course find myself going down conspiracy theory rabbit holes every once in a while, though I would far from consider myself a conspiracy theorist. I’m more like a casual observer, and I scoff at most conspiracy theories after researching them. I’ve come up with my own surrounding the pandemic, but they come entirely from my own imagination so they’re more personal entertainment than anything; however, this entire situation has cemented my homesteading dreams. For years I’ve wanted to make my way into a slower, more self-sufficient lifestyle. We had our own little brood of chickens a few years ago, and I still love the experience of collecting the eggs and just hanging out with the chickens. (Sometimes they were friendly enough that they would even jump into my lap, which, as an animal lover, I had such a blast discovering!) There is nothing quite like eggs so fresh the yolk is blinding.

Of course, there’s also nothing like picking up a little box of technology, taptaptapping a screen, and connecting with an endless number of people. I have no intention of disconnecting. I may be an introvert, but I’m not a hermit.

In this scary and uncertain period that we’re all going through, I’ve found so much comfort in not only being able to maintain my usual habits, but also in using my skills to help keep my family going. I can cook for us. I can keep us warm. I can take care of the baby. I have a role to play and a way to keep busy, and my skills and hobbies aren’t useless, even if it has felt like they were for so long. As someone whose work is often creative and abstract with no immediate monetary payoff, if any, it’s hard to justify how I spend my days in a capitalist society. In this time of crisis—whether you believe it’s big or small or you’re not even sure anymore—it’s reassuring to know that the things I do that don’t make money are still worthwhile.