My son moved out, and my sourdough starter moved in

My oldest child has gone off to college, so when I picked my daughter up from field hockey practice, she was surprised to find the front passenger seat already occupied. A clear, plastic bin sat there, buckled in place by a seat belt. Inside the container, a pale, formless mass muttered and burped.

“You brought the sourdough to the carpool line?” she said.

I’d thought maybe my daughter and her gear could take the back seat, since the dough needed my attention. I like to turn it in a specific way every so often or it won’t rise properly, and I’d loaded it into the translucent container so I could check the air bubbles at red traffic lights. But instead she placed the bin behind her and got into the front seat. At first the dough shimmied and slumped in a way that did not thrill me, but to my relief it settled back into its burbling rhythm.

I made my own sourdough starter about two years ago. I swear I followed the directions, but it never quite got off the ground, so to speak. It added a nice deep flavor to sandwich bread, and I made a million waffles and crackers with it, but no matter what I did, the round rustic bread I aspired to – with starter, not yeast, as the only leavening agent – fell flat. Results were dense, gummy-middled, and lopsided. I ruined an expensive enameled Dutch oven torching catawampus loaves at 500 degrees. Sometimes I would use a sprinkle of instant yeast – which, one of my cookbooks assured me, French bakers do all the time – and would get better outcomes, round loaves that looked like the hearth bread of my imagination. But they weren’t the crackly, thick-crusted, no-yeast-needed sourdough rounds I wanted.

I craved a sourdough I could count on, such as Augustus McCrae’s in Larry McMurtry’s novel “Lonesome Dove.” “Much as I’ve missed you,” Gus tells a friend who arrives late for breakfast, “I ain’t overworking my sourdough just because you and Deets couldn’t manage to get here in time.” A starter more valuable than guests! I longed for that level of security.

I didn’t have that yet. My starter (in no danger of overworking itself) enjoyed its indolence, but I kept trying. Then I went away and parked the starter in the refrigerator. (That slows the process, so you don’t have to feed it as often.) When I got home, there was something streaking through it, a gray rivulet. A sickly pink color tinged the starter, which had also developed strange layers. It smelled very bad. Sourdough recipes are full of fragrance adjectives like “vinegary” or “fruity,” but this was more along the lines of “dead fish in the sun.” It had to go. I suffered as I scraped it out of its white ceramic crock. But I threw it all away.

I learned that sourdough bakers wear our hearts on our sleeves. I wasn’t the only one who had mooned over failed starter. I’d pored over online bakers’ sites and learned the lingo: cloches and oven spring, ears and bubble crowns. A baker on a Reddit forum had lost some starter and grieved. “I’m not ashamed to admit I just cried my eyes out ...my starter experiment really helped me past my most recent struggles with depression so I was more emotionally tied to them than I realized. It’s hard to even want to start a new one right now.” Others offered the baker compassion, and their own starters.

My neighbor makes such terrific bread that his starter has its own Instagram page, and he said I could have some. I was reluctant. Would the resulting bread really belong to me? But I accepted it, and I saw a huge difference. Before its diva-like exit, my starter had been languorous, creamy. The new one was dynamic and bubbly, a real pro. My starter had been the kind of individual who was plenty funny and smart, but liked to lie on the couch, scrolling through Twitter without posting anything. The new one? Sleeves rolled up, biking off to work with a jaunty wave.

I mailed chocolate-chip cookies to my son in college, but anytime something sourdough-related went well, I sent him photos via text. “Note the open crumb!” I wrote. “Nice,” he responded. “Kind of a weird shape, but look at the blisters,” I texted. “Very nice,” he wrote.

My bread kept improving. I accomplished the defined ears and the webbed interior I’d wanted. I baked on. Flour caked my watchband, glazed the eyelets of my boots, stuffed my phone’s charging jack. I doled out starter in containers to friends. I froze loaves, thinsliced them for sandwiches and left them on neighbors’ porches. I fed the new starter a customized mixture of flours twice a day, forced dinner guests to watch it gurgle, and checked on it each dawn, just like Gus McCrae.

One morning, my daughter and a friend were eating pineapple at the kitchen table. I sliced them some of the bread, set down marmalade and jam, and loitered, waiting for praise. “Instead of Simon to feed, you have this sourdough,” my daughter said.