I need to talk about a pretzel.

Not the mall kind. Not the bagged, crunchy, vaguely salty kind that comes in a sack the size of a throw pillow. Not even the soft, doughy, cinnamon-sugar-optional thing they hand you at the airport for the price of a small car. I’m talking about a real Bavarian pretzel. A Brezn. Lye-bathed, mahogany-skinned, blistered and shining, with fat arms that pull apart in a soft chew and a thin twist in the middle that snaps. Coarse salt. A little give. The kind of thing that makes you go quiet for a second.

I did not grow up with these. I grew up with the impostors, and I loved them too — in the way you love something before you know any better. Then I had a real one, the scales fell from my eyes, and now I am ruined. Thanks a lot, pretzel.

Here’s where it gets stupid: I found my first true Brezn at a yarn festival.

Every year we head up to Estes Park for the Wool Market — a wonderful natural-fiber festival with vendors, demonstrations, and a frankly excellent number of approachable sheep and alpacas. Now — I am not the yarn person in this relationship. I am a supportive yarn-adjacent person. I can be trusted to hold skeins, to nod with conviction at a colorway, to carry the bags, and to admire a goat._{truthfully I know a lot about yarn… just not so much the knitting} It’s a lovely time, the mountains are gorgeous, and I am happy to be there.

But the first year we went, there was a stand selling Bavarian pretzels.

Reader, it was life-changing. In the best possible way. I bit into it and something physically rearranged itself in my brain. It was everything a pretzel is supposed to be and everything the impostors had been quietly lying about my entire life. I’m fairly sure I made a noise. Sarah definitely heard the noise.

And now? Now the pretzel is the trip. I will not pretend otherwise. When we start planning whether we’re heading up to Estes Park, there’s the official reason (yarn, quality time, mountains) and there’s the real reason (the pretzel), and they sit in my brain in roughly that order on paper and the exact opposite order in my heart.

Last year I got one on both days. Both days. I want that on the record. I regret nothing. If anything I regret that there were only two days.

There’s something perfect about the fact that the greatest pretzel I’ve ever had isn’t at some specialist Bavarian bakery or on a trip to actual Germany — it’s at a yarn festival in the Colorado mountains, sold out of a stand, eaten standing up under the pines while my wife buys yarn I will later admire at length. It isn’t fancy. It’s just right. Honestly, the setting is half of it: cool mountain air, the smell of the trees, the festival hum, and this warm, salty, perfect thing in my hands.

The Wool Market is coming up again — June 13 and 14. We’re going. And somewhere behind all the logistics — the drive, the where-are-we-staying, the how-much-yarn-is-too-much-yarn (trick question, there is no such number, I’ve been told) — a small and deeply serious part of me is already standing at that stand.

I’m getting one on both days again. Possibly more. And don’t tell me how many is too many. I learned a long time ago that “how many is too many” is a deeply personal journey, and mine ends at a pretzel stand in Estes Park.

Stay curious, support your local yarn-adjacent partner, and never, ever settle for the impostor pretzel.