The Hundred Year Starter She Stole

What I Kept

My daughter is thirty-four. She lives in Cedar Rapids and she has a good job and a small kitchen and until last year she thought sourdough was something you bought at the co-op. This spring I drove up with a plain glass canning jar in a cooler on the passenger seat, a good active cup of the sponge, and I set it in her refrigerator with my own hands and I said, “Keep this fed. This is the sponge. Whatever happens to the crock.”

She laughed at me a little. They always do, at first. She said, “Mom, what crock?” And I said never mind the crock, the crock is just the pot, and I showed her how to feed it, flour and water on a rhythm, and I told her about Ingrid in the dugout and Alma baking at two in the morning and Vera showing up at your door with a warm loaf and never once telling you it would be all right. I told her the whole hundred years while it bubbled on her counter, so that she would know what she was keeping, and why, and that it does not belong to her either.

The crock is still in Cutler, on my counter, where Ingrid would want it. But the sponge is in Cedar Rapids now too, and in my refrigerator, and split into a third jar I keep at the church for the widows who ask, and that is the last thing Darlene never understood. You cannot steal a thing that lives by being given away. She took the one crock because she thought there was only one. But my mother had already made sure there would always be more of it in the world than any one hard woman could ever carry off in the back of a Tahoe.

I fed the sponge this morning. It came up by noon. I am going to bake tomorrow, and take a loaf to the Hoyt girl, whose mother just passed, and I am not going to tell her it will be all right. I am just going to leave the bread.