Sourdough life

Sitting atop the kitchen windowsill at 116^th Place SE, overlooking the 405 freeway and Lake Washington beyond, long before the 405 ever had a traffic jam, was a container, a glass I think, or a big jar without a lid. A rubber band held a cellophane sheet on top of the jar and inside was what my mom called ‘starter’. I was fifteen or so and my mother had just begun her life as a working mom. Prior to this moment she was the traditional stay at home mom because someone has to take care of the five kids and there would have been dead bodies and prison time if my father were to try. So she did it, which was pretty typical for the time if you will recall. Tough financial times had come for my dad in the form of stretches of unemployment and a failed start-up. This was before anyone called them start-ups. They were just new businesses then. My mom, also typically, went to work to pick up the slack. Somewhere in the early stages of this transition she decided that sour dough bread should be grown on our windowsill. And so the glass jar and the creature that lived inside. It needed to be fed once or twice a week. A little flower and water thrown into the mold which would consume it voraciously. Then once in a while she would tear off a chunk of the growing spongy doughy mass and make bread with it, wonderful San Francisco style sourdough bread. This lasted maybe half a year or so. I never knew why she became interested in it or why she let it go. The mold, unfed, withered and died. But I always thought it was cool, this living icky thing that made such stuff of life, such bread. And I loved my mom for doing it.

Recently I am again treated to sourdough delights. Bread, muffins, pancakes.  I am much older than fifteen and my mother died last year. But about three months ago the love of my life brought home a little jar or a glass or some such container. Inside was a piece of starter that had been torn off another starter somewhere in New Jersey by a co-worker and given to her to raise as her very own. I don’t know why my darling became interested in this endeavor and I hope she doesn’t let it go, at least not for a while. I am no mystic, nor no believer in afterlives or spirits, ghosts or goblins. Still, I marvel at serendipity, wonder at recurring patterns, embrace the quantum mechanics of folded space-time, and with the same heart as loved my mother dearly, I love the woman now who bakes such golden brown goodness. And I eat the bread.