“Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862). American essayist, naturalist, and author of Walden, whose writings celebrated attentive living and the quiet wisdom of nature.
Superstitions surrounding Friday the 13th do not concern me. If my middle name weren’t Lee, it would be Lucky. I walk under ladders, ignore black cats, shop, travel and do all the things others won’t do. I will keep right on doing what I’ve always done. But this year, my luck may have run out. Or not.
The day started out on as good a note as possible. I fed my sourdough starter in my usual fashion even though the kitchen was a tad cooler than usual. A slow rise never kept me from planning ahead for scrumptious sourdough pancakes.
After our usual morning routines, Gary and I went out for lunch and returned home. In the afternoon, I preheated the oven to 350° so that it would be ready for whatever it was that I planned to cook for dinner.
Then I went about my affairs as usual. That is until I smelled a wonderful aroma wafting out from the kitchen. Bread? Cake? I was fascinated because I hadn’t started dinner. What could it possibly be?
Just as I walked into the kitchen to see what had lured me there, I exclaimed,
“Oh. No. My sourdough!”
When I turned the oven to preheat after lunch, I forgot that hours earlier I had put my sourdough starter in there on “proof” to get a faster rise.
What I saw when I opened the oven door was not fermentation. It was transformation.
The jar no longer held a living starter. It held evidence of my carelessness. The sides were lacquered in amber and gold, as if the sourdough had tried to climb out and been stopped mid-escape. A caramelized tide line marked how high it had risen before heat overtook it. What had once been soft and elastic was now fixed in place, streaked and hardened like candle wax after a long vigil.
Inside, the starter had transformed into something strangely geological. A pale, spongy dome baked solid at the edges, its surface torn open in small craters where trapped gases had burst and frozen in time. The smell was unmistakable: toasted flour, faint sweetness, a whisper of bread that almost existed.
I stood there looking at a crime scene, fully aware that the culprit and the witness were one and the same.
I had been the one who coaxed these mountain spores into life years ago, watching their first tentative bubbles gather and rise as if they had somewhere important to be. I had fed them, talked about them, and trusted them to do their quiet work while I went about mine.
They had made their way into breads and cakes and cookies and scones and cinnamon rolls, earning praise far beyond my mountaintop kitchen. And yet, on this particular Friday the 13th, I had forgotten them entirely, leaving a small natural wonder behind, unnoticed, to the fate of an oven I had set to preheat.
For a time, I did nothing but stand there, laughing at my stupidity while absorbing the lesson. There seemed little left to do but clean the jar and move on.
But just when I was feeling the depth of loss, I remembered. Flakes. Sourdough flakes.
A year or so ago I had dried some starter and set it aside, more as an experiment than anything else. I never imagined needing them. They sat unnoticed in a small jar, ordinary and still, offering no hint that they might hold anything alive.
I weighed a small portion and put it in a bowl with an equal amount of warm water. I watched as they softened and disappeared into a cloudy mixture. Then I added an equal amount of flour, creating a pasty potential. It felt more like a laboratory ritual than a kitchen rescue. Truthfully, I wasn’t certain anything would happen. But I held on to hope, realizing that those flakes were the only thing left for me to try.
At first, nothing happened.
The mixture sat on the counter looking exactly as one might expect flour and water to look when stirred together: pale, still, and entirely unremarkable. I told myself not to expect too much. After all, these were only dried remnants, fragments of something that had once been alive. Whatever vitality they possessed had long since faded.
But some time later–hours, perhaps less–I noticed a change so small it might easily have been missed. A tiny bubble appeared along the edge of the bowl. Then another. The surface loosened almost imperceptibly, as if taking a slow breath after a long sleep.
By the next morning, there was no denying it. The mixture had awakened. Fine bubbles traced delicate pathways through the paste, and a faint, familiar aroma rose to meet me—not flour, not water, but something living. Something remembering what it had been.
What astonished me most was not simply that the sourdough culture had returned, but how quickly it did so. Years ago, when I first coaxed those mountain spores into existence, I waited days for signs of life, peering into the jar with the anxious patience of a novice. This time, revival came with confidence, as though the culture already knew what it was meant to do.
Up from the flakes it arose.
What had seemed lifeless only hours earlier now stretched upward, gathering strength from invisible work. I found myself watching it the way one watches a garden after rain—not interfering, not hurrying, simply witnessing growth. A living culture once again, carrying within it all the strength and possibility of its ancestral spores.
And standing there, I realized that nothing about it felt accidental. Life, given the smallest chance, had simply resumed its work.
Watching it rise again, I began to understand that what I had witnessed was more than a small kitchen recovery. I had baked the starter, yes. But I had not baked the possibility.
Something essential had been preserved long before the mistake was made. Tucked away almost absentmindedly, those flakes had carried forward what mattered most. Given warmth, patience, and a little attention, the sourdough culture simply resumed its work, as though interruption were only a pause and not an ending.
It struck me then how stubbornly life finds its way back, even after neglect, even after carelessness. What appears lost may only be waiting for the right conditions to begin again.
Perhaps that is the real lesson Friday the 13th had to offer me this year. Not bad luck. Not superstition confirmed. Just a moment of carelessness and a jar of forgotten flakes, both filled with truth. We measure our mistakes with finality, and we assume that one moment of inattention defines the whole story.
Nature does not agree.
The Wired Researcher 