Every autumn the village held the Long Table, a big dinner in the square, and Selma the baker had to bake three hundred loaves for it. This year the dough for all of them was already rising in her shop when, at six in the evening, her big oven cracked with a loud bang. Smoke filled the room, and the repairman could not come until Monday.
Selma sat down on a flour sack and said nothing. Her granddaughter Lotte, who was ten, ran outside and rang the school bell. Soon the neighbors came, in slippers and aprons. "Who has an oven?" Selma asked, and everyone did. She cut the dough into pieces, and everybody took a bucket of it home.
All night the village baked. Lights shone in every window, and the smell of warm bread filled the streets. Children rode their bikes through the dark with loaves wrapped in towels, and old men pushed wheelbarrows. Selma ran from house to house, tasting, advising and laughing.
At dawn the Long Table was covered with bread: round loaves, long loaves, braided loaves, a loaf shaped like a heart and one that was a little burnt. Selma tasted a piece. "This is not my bread," she said. "No, Grandma," said Lotte. "It's ours." Since then the festival has been called the Night of a Hundred Ovens. Selma still has her cracked oven, and she uses it as a flowerpot.
