Mic 41: One Minute of Yeast

A friend asked me to stop over and feed her sourdough starter.

Not water her plants. Not check her mail. Feed her sourdough starter. I stood in her kitchen looking at a jar of flour paste with a name, and something in me went quiet, and a bit started to form right there against the counter. That's usually how I know — the quiet before the bit is louder than the bit itself.

It was Tuesday, and it was already late, so if I wanted to try it out that night, I had to drop into the Winchester and hope my name got pulled for a one-minute set. It did. One minute isn't much room to build a case, so I went straight at it.

A friend of mine asked me to come over and feed her sourdough starter while she was out of town.

People, what is this witchcraft?

Women are feeding and naming their sourdough starters. I barely fed and named my children.

Yeast.

You know who had sourdough starters? Our great-grandmothers. And you know what they named it?

Bread. They named it fucking bread.

Women are posting pictures of their yeast on Instagram. It's a microorganism, not a rescue dog.

I don't want to see your yeast. I don't want to say yeast. I don't know why, but it hurts me a little.

Yeast.

I don't want to sound like a suffragette, but we fought a hundred years to get out of the kitchen, and now we're voluntarily going back to it.

We are one social post away from calling our husbands "the Provider!"

That's my time.