Rainy Day Challah Haibun

It has been raining continuously for three days, but it feels like it has rained forty days and forty nights. An image of Noah’s Ark floods my mind. I want to climb into it with my family. We are four and can enter the Ark, two by two, like the animals. I am waiting for the dove with the olive branch in its beak, to tell me the rain is over. My neighbour bakes Challah bread every Friday, and today is Friday. Before the pandemic, we went together to the Jewish bakery to buy Challah, but she’s eighty-one, and together we’re afraid of the coronavirus. Some stores have run out of flour. Everyone is baking at home now. She calls me on the telephone and tells me there will be no Challah bread today, though we managed to get a bag of flour. She says she didn’t feel like baking. She asks whether I’m writing something about the rain, since she knows I love writing. ‘Come on, you can do it,’ she says. Something in her voice, as she breaks into French sporadically, since she is French-Canadian, tells me I must write about the rain. I’m glad I know French, so I can understand her. I tell her I write when I am inspired. She says she bakes when she is inspired, and that I am just like her. I guess writing and baking are both an art in themselves. I post a picture of the Challah bread from the previous Friday on my Facebook page. The caption reads, ‘The Art of Food.’ She is a food artist. Someday, a great artist might paint a picture of the beautifully designed Challah bread, fit for the Louvre. Noah’s Ark could be drawn in the shape of the Challah Bread. Both are symbols of peace.
That sweet Challah bread
With the sweetness of love baked in
She is an artist!