Pretzels

(listening to "Cortege et Litanie," by Marcel Dupre)
I can't come up with a word that describes the way fresh pretzels smell. It's bread, but there is something else there. Pretzels are bathed in hot, slightly alkaline water before they are baked (for the glossy skin and chewy texture). Perhaps that makes the smell slightly different, but I don't know how to describe it. It smells like it did when I made pretzels with my late grandmother as a kid. Exactly the same. I baked these pretzels for a potluck at work, but I felt some very personal emotions when I made them. These feelings were strong when I struggled with the elastic dough, seeking the perfect amount of flour on my hands. Grandma's knobby hands, with their flowerpetal-delicate skin, subdued the dough with infuriating ease. You are not a true master of something before you've done it a lot. Her pretzels were slender, shiny and consistent. They were laid out to cool on towels beneath the high ceiling of the bright farmhouse kitchen. It was a thousand years ago, and it was this morning.
I squeezed mustard onto one at midnight, and I felt that I had not wasted my time and flour.
As with my stollen, the pretzels taste pretty decent, but they are uglier than Grandma's. It is my fond wish that people eat them and are happy. I would hope that Grandpa would have given a herzlich "Ausgezeichnet."