The Hundred Year Starter She Stole

I should tell you about Darlene, because if I make her a cartoon you will not believe the rest, and every word of the rest is true. Darlene married my brother Roy in 2009 at the Methodist church, and she was, for a long time, fine. Pretty in a hard way, good with money, the kind of woman who ran the church bake sale like a military operation and made sure everyone knew the numbers came in over goal because of her. She was not warm, but Roy was warm enough for two, and I told myself that was a marriage that worked, one soft and one sharp, the way a lot of them do out here.

What changed was the county fair, and then the internet. Around 2019 Darlene got it into her head that she was going to be somebody. She started a little home bakery out of her kitchen, Prairie Rose she called it, selling loaves at the Panora farmers market on Saturdays, and she was good at the selling part. She could talk. She had a laminated sign and a card reader and a story, and she learned fast that the story sold more bread than the bread did. City people would drive out from Des Moines on the weekend and pay nine dollars for a loaf because Darlene told them it was made the old way, the real way, and they wanted to believe they were buying a piece of a vanishing world.

The trouble was that Darlene’s bread was not the old way. It was a decent sourdough she’d learned off a website, fed on a schedule, made with a starter she’d bought as a dehydrated packet from a company in Vermont. That is not a sin. Most bakers start somewhere. But it was not a hundred years old, and it was not Vera’s, and everybody who tasted both knew there was no comparison. My mother’s bread had a sourness that came in at the back of your throat like a memory. It had a chew to it. Darlene’s was bread. Vera’s was a place you’d been.

Darlene knew it too. That was the whole problem. She had the sign and the story and the card reader, and she did not have the one thing that would have made all of it true. She did not have the crock.