This is the most amount of time I’ve been home since I started at Proctor my freshman year. In the summer I’m away for eight weeks at summer camp. I’m a huge baking enthusiast and any chance I get I’ll make something, so with all this free time I decided to do something productive.

I walked into my kitchen, taking in the wooden island in the middle, the white cabinets, the stovetop, and oven. The ideas of what to make were bubbling to the surface. I wanted to try something new, completely different than my normal bakes. Homemade breads have always interested me. A bit too ambitious, I went straight for trying sourdough bread, not a basic white sandwich bread. What I didn’t know until I started looking at recipes is that you need sourdough starter, not yeast. I spent the next five days feeding my starter, a mixture of all purpose flour and warm water. It started to become bubbly and smell like sourdough should.

I once again had to keep waiting. The dough was finally ready to bake after two days of working on it. I put the round dough onto a baking sheet and put it into the hot oven, I felt the heat coming out of the oven in waves on my face. I opened the oven door about an hour later to a flat, dense loaf of bread. The kitchen didn’t have that beautiful fresh baked bread smell. I was pretty disappointed, but tried to keep my head held high.

So far this social distancing thing has been like that first attempt at making bread. Lots of waiting around for something to happen. Wanting to be with friends, hanging out on campus in the sun while the snow melted, but that wasn’t happening, and I was, and still am, pretty disappointed. Of course there’s FaceTime, but it’s not the same as being with them in person talking about the most random stuff or going off on a new adventure.

After a month of waiting around, classes started and it was rough. The first week was full of tech problems, and for me an almost constant headache after each school day, but it was something to do, something to keep me occupied instead of sleeping until noon and watching tv the rest of the day. Through all the struggles I’ve tried to keep my spirits up and my head held high.

A few days later I got some sourdough starter from a neighbor who had gotten it from a local bakery. I used a different recipe and the next day I pulled a beautiful golden brown loaf of bread out of the oven. The crust was crispy and flaky, the inside had nice big air bubbles and it tasted amazing!

Classes have been improving, I’m finding ways to manage my screen time and keep the headaches away. We’re in a time when we need to be patient and flexible whether it be waiting for someone to figure out WebEx or making bread. Everyone needs to remember we’re all in this together, we’ve got this, stay strong, and go Hornets!