The Hundred Year Starter She Stole

The County Fair

The Guthrie County Fair is in July, but the one that mattered was the following July, a full year after the funeral, because by then Darlene had gone from a farmers-market woman to a somebody with a newspaper feature and a grocery contract, and the fair board asked her to be a judge. Not a competitor. A judge, in the baked goods division, and to give a little talk at the ribbon ceremony about heritage baking. Darlene, keeper of the hundred-year flame. She wore a blue dress and she brought the crock, my mother’s chipped brown crock, and set it on the table by the winning pies like a relic, and people lined up to take pictures with it.

I was there. Of course I was there. I had entered a loaf.

I had entered my bread, made from the jar in my refrigerator, the true sponge, in the yeast breads category, under my own name, Nora Haas. And I had said nothing to anybody about any of it, not for a year, because you do not spring a thing like this early. You let it ripen. The fair was where it was ripe.

I did not win. I want you to hear that, because it is the best part. My true, hundred-year, Ingrid’s-dugout sourdough took second place to a woman’s honey oat loaf, and the judge who placed me second, who wrote on my card “good crumb, sour a touch aggressive for the category,” was Darlene. She stood over my bread, my mother’s bread, Ingrid’s bread, the actual living hundred years she had poured down her drain, and she did not recognize it. She could not. She had never known what it was. She marked it down for being too sour, which is like marking down the ocean for being too wet, and she moved on to the honey oat, and I stood ten feet back in the crowd and I felt my mother laughing.

That was the moment I stopped being angry for good and started being patient on purpose. Because Darlene had just proven, in front of the fair board, that she could not tell my mother’s actual starter from a stranger’s. And I had it on a judging card in her own handwriting.