Friendship Bread

Amish Friendship Bread is more than a recipe--it's a way of thinking. In our hi-tech world almost everything comes prepackaged and designed for instant gratification. So where does a recipe that takes ten days to make fit in? Maybe it's a touch stone to our past--to those days not so very long ago when everything we did took time and where a bread that took ten days to make was not as extraordinary as it seems today.

I remember my mother and her friends passing bags of friendship bread back and forth when I was a kid. I associate the smell of yeast and cinnamon and sugar with this bread. It reminds me of the best parts of my childhood, of feeling warm and loved.

It reminds me of sustenance and the way bread feeds us and nourishes us. Sometimes when there is nothing else, evan just a piece of bread will go a long way for someone who is hungry.

But most of all, it reminds me of friendship between women. Women who lovingly share this bread with the other women in their lives. Who share it in order to spread good cheer and love and extend a hand to someone who might be needing it. To say be well or I'm sorry or I love you.

It reminds me of hope. And help. And the very best parts of life.