Dead sourdough

This feels like the day when we might as well throw in the towel. Deadlines are unmet. The bank account is in the red, and the cell phone carrier turned off our phones. Service was restored after I arranged for a post-dated check to pay the bill after the paycheck arrived. At least they were good enough to waive what would have been a $45 reconnect fee after I told them that it might be cheaper for me if I just terminated my relationship with them altogether.

But perhaps the worst calamity of the day was Jim killing the sourdough starter.

A little bit of back story might be in order.

For many, many years, I have fantasized about having sourdough starter. A small jar in my refrigerator, ready to use at a moment's notice. I started to think about how I might realize this fantasy when I bought my first house in Seattle in 1993. But then I moved to Hawai'i, lived in rental units for 11 years, and came back to Seattle overweight and with little desire to eat sourdough. The very thought of having something fermenting in the frij appalled my husband so I shelved the fantasy for awhile.

The sourdough story took on a different twist a few years later when we moved to upstate New York and bought our 1840s farmhouse-type house on Squashville Road. Smitten with a new passion for raising food and hens, Jim began gardening with a passion, canning and freezing our summer harvests, and reading up on every possible method known of building a root cellar in a basement to keep the produce fresh through the winter.

With this passion came one for baking homemade bread.

The bread baking began with a gift of a hand-me-down bread machine. It evolved slowly into buying first packets and eventually jars of yeast and making doughs late at night. This was my vocation, by the way. Reliving the days of eighth-grade cooking class when our teacher told us to make yeast rolls on days that we were frustrated because we could work out our angers through our kneading, I eagerly delved my fists into yeast-infused flour, oil, sugar, and water, pounding, pulling, twisting, folding until the mass beneath my hands evolved into a smooth, blistery-surfaced dough. Large fresh loaves would be ready for consumption some three, four, six hours later.

In the midst of this enters our friend Doug, known affectionately among some of us as "the streak" for the white patch that graces his black thatch of hair. Doug is not a backyard farmer, but he is an avid reader, cook, and accumulator of odd items, one of which is a batch of sourdough starter that he's kept alive for 20 years.

I've known Doug for about 23 years, when he joined a book group in Seattle that my college friend and former Seattle Times colleague Ferdinand deLeon and I started. Doug met Ferdinand through his then-girlfriend-now wife Janette, when the two of them (Doug and Janette) made sales calls for Time Life Books. The friendship persisted through numerous moves across the Pacific and the U.S. continent, and periodically, Doug would offer me his sourdough starter.

I accepted the offer in March. The starter arrived in New York from Doug's refrigerator in Honolulu via federal express. It included explicit instructions on how to revive it, and urged me to get the revival process going within minutes of opening it. Jim, overcome by adventure, took over from there.

For the next two days, he assiduously fed the starter warm water, flour, and sugar. It grew from a tiny tablespoon to a full bowl. Jim turned some of the starter into bread, and discovered that he could make bread. Between Good Friday and last Sunday, we always had fresh bread. My role as the baker had been displaced.

I didn't mind. I work full time and am trying to run a marathon and whip out a book on the side. When I made bread, it was a fortnightly affair and I would always make a huge batch of dough so that there would be bread to last 10 to 14 days. Jim claimed that this made the bread go stale. He vowed that his loaves would always be baked fresh, and would never last more than two days. For the most part, he lived up to his promise.

But the sourdough starter sputtered. Perhaps it was overuse. Perhaps it was excess experimentation. Perhaps it was heat, humidity, or simply the fact that we live in the country, have a homestead sort of farm, and as a result often subsist side-by-side with chaos. At any rate, Jim tonight turned on the oven because I wanted to bake a dish of eggplant, garlic scapes, tomatoes, summer squash, and mozzarella cheese. He reached into the cold over to remove the bowl of starter and we discovered that it looked a little moldy and smelled not sour but foul.

"I killed it," Jim moaned. "Twenty year old starter, gone."

We grieved. Somehow, its death was like the loss of a loved one, even if it had only been in our lives a mere six months. All of our other problems -- unmet deadlines, unpaid bills, unusable cell phones -- seemed so trivial compared with the loss of this living, breathing, vital organism that had powered so many of our loaves of daily bread.

We resolved to start anew, and Jim began a new self-starter alongside a small batch of the existing one that we decided we would try at least once to clean up and revive.

        11:30 p.m. approached, and I felt one more failure coming up on the horizon. Tonight was going to be the night -- the first night in 144 days -- when I would fail to write 750 words. My spot on the site's acclaimed Wall of Awesomeness would be dropped. I would go to the Wall of Shame.

        What to do? Write about debt, again? Find a silver lining, again? Be cheerful when my spirit was in the dumps?

        "Write about dead sourdough," mumbled Jim, still numb from grief.

I was one hundred words into the rumination when it dawned on me. The starter has not died. It lives in at least two domiciles separate from ours. Doug still has some starter, and so possibly does Caitlin, a friend in Saratoga. Caitlin is like Doug in some ways. She has a passion for cooking and for acquiring and holding onto odd items. We had given her a jar of starter in April shortly before her wedding and shortly after reviving Doug's.

"It's alive, it's alive," I burst out in a song.

"Caitlin has it."

A grin and grey cloud lifted from Jim's shoulder. He sent Caitlin a text-message (which our restored cellphone service enabled him to do) and we ended our day folding up instead of throwing in the towel, thinking about tomorrow with a renewed note of hope.

       Every day is fresh, as long as the starter lives.