November 2025 - Baker’s Secret

Nature is both a generous and an exacting teacher. Our gleanings of the seasons – toil, transcendendence, patience, acceptance, drought – are as present in us as they are in the flavors of the dishes which grace our Thanksgiving tables. This November, may we harvest nature’s lessons of the heart as we gather and give thanks for whatever “common ground” we can find with those dear ones we love but don’t always understand.

Baker’s Secret

by Linda Flaherty Haltmaier

I meet you in the space of memory now,

archived moments

safe from actual togetherness

yet tinged

with asynchronous affection.

I think of the lemon scone you loved,

the one from the bakery in Cambridge

near Julia Child’s house.

I discovered it, too,

independent of you —

stalked it often,

broke pieces off the fist-sized lump,

a human heart of flour, butter, and zest,

gaudy with thick glaze.

It demanded two cups of coffee

just to make a dent.

Dad walked in with your lemon scone one day —

our shared obsession laid bare.

You, too, had fallen under its sweet spell.

Even so, our magnetic north never lined up —

I made your needle spin wildly.

Talking was hard,

more than mother-daughter hard.

A bolt of panic crackled

whenever you found yourself alone with me.

What might spill out of that mouth?

your eyes seemed to say.

But we could talk lemon scones

and blueberry muffins with a sugary dome

like the ones from Jordan Marsh —

or the triumphant Îles flottante you made

for your tennis lunch.

Sometimes I dream of those floating islands,

pillowy quenelles drifting

on a custard lake —

there in a landscape of whipped eggs and sugar,

we found common ground.

Linda Flaherty Haltmaier is an award-winning author and the Poet Laureate Emeritus of Andover, MA. She is the winner of the Robert Frost Poetry Prize. Her first collection, Rolling up the Sky, won the Homebound Publications Poetry Prize. Her most recent collections, To the Left of the Sun and Shadows Set to Burn (in which “Baker’s Secret” appears), received the American BookFest Award for Poetry and the International Book Award for Narrative Poetry, respectively. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she lives near the ocean on Boston’s North Shore.