I must be getting old. I keep telling my sourdough story, and I get tired of typing out the whole thing again. This is surely the sign of my elder years.

But, here it is:

I was about 17 or 18 years old, and had just finished a house-sitting stint a few blocks from home. My neighbor paid me, but also passed a treasure from her family on to me: a portion of the sourdough starter that had been passed on for generations in her mother’s family.

I was a whole-foods 1970s vegetarian at the time, so real, aged sourdough starter was quite the gift. And it came with a story: the starter passed to me had come from a batch made by an Alaskan miner great-something-granduncle, who’d mixed up his sourdough starter in the late 1890s, nurtured through his adventures in Alaska, and brought it home to share with his relatives. As many of us know, leavened bread was hard to find in those days, and miners carefully guarded theirs. When I was gifted my batch, it was 80 some years old, strong in flavor, and magic in the breads and pancakes I made with it.

Fast forward 20 or so years, and my carefully cultured starter might have a bit higher proportion of whole wheat and natural sugars in the mix, but it was still strong and vibrant and gave off that sharp odor of straight alcohol when you uncapped the jar. Mine was stored in a beautiful aqua glass jar with a clamp-top lid, always living in the back of my fridge.

Until my roommate threw it out.

She was a very nice woman, but kind of a terrible roommate. I could go on and on, but in THIS particular story, this woman who rarely cleans the kitchen after messing it up takes it upon herself to clean out the fridge. She sees the sourdough starter jar, pops the lid, thinks it’s something gone bad, and NOT ONLY THROWS OUT THE STARTER but the goddam beautiful jar to boot.

I was furious. Thirty years later, I’m still mad. But there was nothing I could do. And out of some kind of misguided petulance, I haven’t been able to bring myself to start a new batch from scratch. Someday maybe, but not today.

Anyway, that’s my sourdough starter story.