crumb

a hand quern for a bench or a windowsill. click wheat in, then turn the stone — empty-handed is fine — and after a few honest scrapes of stone on stone, flour. grinding is work you do, not a machine you feed; that is the whole idea of the block. (unless the mill stands nearby, in which case the wind does the wrist work.)

flour makes dough, dough meets a fire, and out come three bakes: a berry pastry, a honey bun, a seeded loaf. every one of them feeds exactly as well as bread — the same numbers, on purpose. a pastry is a nicer thing to hand someone, not a better thing to eat. the point is that you baked it, and gave it away.

and the trail: scatter crumbs as you walk and your way home is written in gold on the dark. mind it, though — the wild birds eat the trail behind you (a crow that eats your crumbs thinks a notch better of you), and the rain takes what the birds miss. a trail laid under cover keeps longest, which is where you needed it anyway.