Day six of the starter situation

The starter has been sitting on the counter for six days and I have been — wait, no. I cannot open like that. That was literally a recent title. Let me try again.

Thursday morning. Jake left early. The apartment is mine, the coffee is hot, and at some point in the last twelve hours my sourdough starter decided to make a break for it.

Day six of the starter situation

I’m not even upset. That’s what concerns me. I looked at the overflow — the slow, dramatic cascade of fermented flour water down the side of the jar, pooling slightly on the counter I cleaned two days ago — and my only response was to get a mug and sit down nearby to think about it. This is what summer does to you. This is what three family archive binders and a week of coordination emails does to your capacity for urgency.

Here’s my current priority list, in order: coffee, sourdough observation, eventually the archive follow-up emails for the two family contacts Margaret introduced last week, and then, if energy permits, cleaning the counter. The archive project is genuinely exciting — there’s something happening with the multi-family coordination that I didn’t expect, this feeling that I’m building something that actually matters to more than just me — but the brain cannot run on heritage documentation alone. Sometimes it needs to sit in a sleep shirt at 9am and have a staring contest with a jar of bread.

It started on day four. It escalated on day six. We are now on day six.

I took the photos for the blog. Obviously. Jake would have documented this too if he were here, probably added a caption about structural integrity and called it research. I’m going to clean the counter eventually. The starter is going back in the fridge with a stern internal talk. The archive emails will get answered this afternoon when I’m actually a person. But right now: mug. Stool. Bread jar. Quiet apartment. This is the morning I needed.