When I left Maine Saturday afternoon, a perfect ring of clouds edged the horizon. The blue sky was open all above me, and those clouds felt significant as I left an extraordinary thing: The Kneading Conference.
I'd been at the Skowhegan fairgrounds, which become a bread camp during the last weekend in July. I watched people feed wood, and much later dough, into the mouths of mobile ovens that sat on the backs of trailers. Everyone was talking all the time about grains and bread. I got to go here last year, and I love it on so many levels.
One of them is a simple affinity for a worn-out industrial city in the Northeast. I'd been to Skowhegan ages before I knew where it was, traveling through Richard Russo's book "Empire Falls." This is one of the little Maine cities he based the novel on, in addition to growing up in Gloversville.
Another fond feeling I have for the area is how food is building community, or the community is building food. The energy continues throughout the year at The Somerset Grist Mill, where a flour mill sits in the former county jail, as well as a teaching kitchen, a cafe, a knitting store and pottery studio.
This is reinvention based on inventions that drew us together and fed us way back when: fire and bread.
As I was leaving, the clouds surrounded me like the people who worked behind the scenes all week to make the event happen.
The clouds and the people make a model I admire, of a city trying to find a new fire in its blood. I'm not ready to start a mill in Troy, but the notion does occur.
Amy Halloran is a Troy writer. Her website is at http://amyhalloran.net.