Good Pizza Makes Good Neighbors

An essay from 2020-2021 that's been top of mind for me lately

We moved into a new place just before our wedding and our friends gave us gifts that could both grow old with us and be immediately useful in our new house. At home in our yet-to-be-arranged living room, we unwrapped art, pottery, vintage Smokey the Bear salt and pepper shakers. The first of Lauren’s aunts I loved gave us a blue enameled cast iron Dutch oven. And my oldest friend and his wife gave us a proofing basket, bench scrapers, and a lame for making sourdough bread.

Nearly every week since late September 2019 I’ve been coaxing my sourdough starter awake on Friday nights, massaging it every hour on Saturdays, and then, holding my breath, gently flinging it from the basket into the hot Dutch oven on Sunday mornings.

It’s been going okay. It’s definitely bread, but it’s not really sourdough bread. It doesn’t make that sound when you rip it: the crunch of a boot in snow. My new husband tells me it’s not dense, it’s delicious. But I know the truth: It’s more earth than cloud.

I slow down on baking in early 2020 because I’m traveling a lot for work. Lauren’s out of town working on a movie and I have three trips to Seattle planned. The first is in January to shoot a video on the geology of the Olympic Peninsula. It’s colder than we expect, which both slows us down while also forcing us to move faster.

Lauren’s movie is based on a short story and the big project he and the rest of the art department are working toward is building, and then burning down, a house. They’re scheduled to wrap March 29 and on March 30, we fly to Hawaii for our honeymoon. We’re cutting it close, but my plan is to pack for both of us the week before.

My second trip to Seattle is in February for the annual meeting for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The mood is light as people arrive, like kids reuniting for summer camp. But early on, every presentation actively reorients itself around this new coronavirus. I start to feel claustrophobic in the hotel elevator.

We got married at an old boy scout camp where our friends shared bunk houses, food, and bathrooms. Before my third trip to Seattle is canceled, I start intensely digging through the basement for the hand sanitizer and wet-wipes we stocked the boy scout bathrooms with.

Our house is still a mix of packed and unpacked as we decide what kind of lives we’ll live here. The Dutch oven and the proofing basket live on the counter where I can always find them. But I accidentally on purpose lose our copy of Hawaii the Big Island Revealed: The Ultimate Guidebook even before Lauren’s film shoot is cut short.

When he tells me he’s coming home, I spend an hour in bed with a big cry because I’m relieved, but also because I need to exorcize my sadness and selfishness over our now canceled honeymoon. As Montana goes into lockdown, we try to joke that we were already planning to spend all this time with just each other anyway, but our tempers are short and I get angry with Lauren when he’s too thankful for our health and home.

We’ll be married for six months about a week before we would have flown to Hawaii. We take a chunk of our wedding cake out of the freezer to thaw because we need something to look forward to. That’s all, though. Everything else feels too frivolous but also not celebratory enough.

It’s not warm yet, but we’re restless and start waking up the dirt in our yard. On our six-month anniversary, our neighbors peek over the fence to tell us they’re making pizza in their adobe oven later if we want some. We do.

That night, heat slowly escapes from under my layers as Lauren and I stand together on a bench in our yard drinking cold Costco beers and hollering back and forth over the fence with Matt and Sarah. They’re maybe five years older than us, no longer newlyweds. As we eat at the little table in our yard, we decide we’re Lady and the Tramp in the alley behind the Italian restaurant as our new friends slide pizza after pizza onto our plates held high in the air.

Sarah brags about Matt’s pizza dough and Lauren brags about my sourdough loaves. We all bitch about the run on flour, and I admit that my bread isn’t that great yet. Matt shares his approach for me: he almost never refrigerates his starter and he sets the oven temperature lower but bakes longer. Sarah promises I’ll know when the starter is ready. “It’ll talk to you,” she says.

The night ends a lot like the night of our wedding: Lauren and I sit close together near a fire, chatting and eating under the stars. We don’t tell Matt and Sarah it’s a special day for us, but as they slip shots of tequila over the fence on the pizza peel, we clink our little glasses and both know that the other can’t believe our luck.

We’re too full to eat cake, but plan to eat it for breakfast as we crawl into bed smelling like smoked mozzarella and laughing about another type of Dutch oven.

Sarah was right and in the coming weeks, my starter does start talking to me. It looks like the wet version of what I want my bread to look like: a pillowy structure that almost doesn’t make physical sense. It’s mostly air, like marshmallow paste with holes in it. Strong, but also soft. My loaves are getting prettier and I take pictures sometimes but I don’t dare post them. Sourdough is too cool now, and maybe it’s just because I haven’t left our house or yard in weeks, but my loaves feel too intimate to share online.

We learn more about the virus and stop wiping down our groceries. When Matt and Sarah start remodeling their garage, we venture into their backyard for a final farewell to the pizza oven before it has to be torn down. We learn we have friends in common, but we mostly talk about food and travel. Matt entertains us by describing how to cook Eggs Benedict for 20 people on a raft trip. The trick is paddling really fast to get ahead of everyone you’re about to feed and vinegar in the water; the egg water, not the river water.

About a year after our pizza dinner over the fence, the four of us are catching up in the funny part of our front yards where we all rake, mow, and water. Matt tells us they got their first doses of the vaccine and where to get them. Before he says anything, Lauren looks at me and lets me decide. I work in science communication and am excited and relieved that we have a vaccine, but after talking with my doctor and midwife, I’ve decided to wait a couple weeks, until it’s less risky for me to get a fever.

“I’m pregnant,” I tell Matt and Sarah. They’re the first people outside of our family and a few really close friends who we tell. They’re excited and congratulate us, but of course, we don’t hug.

Once my morning sickness passes and I get my vaccine, I’m pregnant all through the nicer months when it’s easier to gather outside. In the sunlight, people are delighted to see my belly, a rotund sign of hope, and I let myself imagine that a post-pandemic childhood could look a little like my own. But at night, I dream about my baby being outside my body and mountain lions circling us in a glass house, getting too close, too strong.

My body morphs and so does the virus. Our daughter is born while everyone we know is dancing around the Delta variant. We have no idea what’s happening outside our house. Our friends bring us food for weeks, but try to protect us from the stress of the world. Flu season, Christmas, and the Omicron variant come. My mom still hasn’t met her granddaughter and Lauren’s parents haven’t held her.

I go back to work, but almost everyone is remote now. Sunday, the night before my second week back, Lauren gets a text message from Matt. He’s experimenting with sourdough and has a pizza for us. It’s not the first time a hot meal has appeared in the little window of our front door. Sarah and I aren’t tall enough to see through the window directly, so she frequently just holds up a plate of pasta or pot of soup so I can see it as she knocks. Tonight, we’ve just made squash soup and we try to send some home with Matt, but he’s just made a ton himself.

It’s dark and snowy outside, but our house is warm and smells like squash and pepperoni. We eat our pizza, dipping the fluffy sourdough crusts into our soup while I nurse our baby. Her childhood is already different from mine, and Lauren’s. Sometimes, especially when I’m up with her in the middle of the night, it feels like the world is scarier now than when we were kids. But not tonight. Not on nights when we make soup in our dutch oven from Lauren’s aunt and especially not on nights when we eat Matt’s sourdough pizza.

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In the spring of 2020, during lockdown, I somehow was admitted into a non-fiction writing group I only later realized was for people working in healthcare during the pandemic. Led by the kind and brilliant David Allen Cates, we met over zoom and the group felt like it was part therapy session, part vigil, part the best writing group I’d ever experienced. Even though it quickly became clear that I did not work in healthcare, they let me stay and we extended the timeline we’d all signed up for multiple times. I wrote this piece over the course of meeting with that group.