The summer of 2021, not the covid summer, but a covid summer nonetheless, my mom and I decided to start baking sourdough together. Yes, yes, a novel idea! Yes, yes, just like everyone else! I make fun of us for hopping onto the trend, but I really do enjoy thinking about thousands of people, around the world, all baking sourdough at the same time.
I was working from home, from my-childhood-backyard-home-home, sporting two braids in my hair and a tank top over a bikini most days. “Business on top, party on the bottom” I called it. My mom found much comedy in me classifying braids and a tank top as “business.” In this way, I do miss working for a start-up nut snack company. In every way, I miss spending regular time with my mom.
I also applied to compete on Survivor — the reality game show wherein you’re starved and tortured by nature and your own mind as you compete to win $1,000,000. Make of that what you will as to my mental state.
While most breads require baker’s yeast to rise, sourdough requires a starter — a live fermented culture of fresh flour and water. Through chemistry and yeast and magic and bacteria, flour and water come together and come to life. The result: a starter with no life-span. The world’s oldest is reported to be over 5,000 years old. As long as you feed it, and pass it to someone who will feed it when you are no longer here, you can keep it alive. And you, and then they, can make sourdough.
My mom’s responsibilities were to: 1) bring the starter to life — that is, mix 1 cup of flour and ½ cup of water, and then feed the gloopy mixture with more water and flour over the course of about two weeks — and then 2) keep the starter alive. Naturally, she found a shortcut to the bringing-to-life part, ordering a live starter on Amazon (hate to link to Amazon but we caved to Bezos, oh or much better you can buy a 1,000 year old live Italian starter on Etsy?) We ripped it open, followed the short list of instructions, and just like that, our baby, or as we called her, “the baby,” was born. Our stinky, bubbly baby. All my mom was to do from that point on was keep her alive, which meant doing two things each week: 1) discarding half of the baby, and 2) feeding the remaining half with flour and water.
With the starter ready for use, eager for it even, I was able to begin my part — the baking. If I may say so, I got pretty good at it all — the mixing, the waiting, the kneading (two ways), the shaping, the scoring, and finally, the baking. Once a week, I’d flour the kitchen counter at 9 AM and be calling for my mom to come see and smell our fresh, golden loaf by 4 PM. The smell of sourdough in the oven will always remind me of that time at home in my life. Due to both anticipation and freshness, the day-of slices were our favorites. Always with a generous spread of salted butter (specifically Isigny Sainte-Mère Salted Butter With Coarse Salt), often with our favorite pea soup.
My mom, on the other hand, struggled with the first step of keeping our starter alive — the discarding. The discarding of half of our baby, our positively fertile starter. Not unlike a newborn child, when you feed the baby, it grows. So if you do not discard half of it, even if baking a loaf each week like I was, you will have an unnecessary, unruly amount. But neither my mother nor I know how to get rid of a good thing, even some of it. We are attached. We are unreasonably uncomfortable with the concept of discarding something fruitful, something with potential. That’s how we ended up with jars of starter occupying the floor of our fridge. Jars I couldn’t get through even if I quit my nut snack job and baked my hungry heart out.
Now out of the nest (I do relate to a small, scared bird) and on my own in Brooklyn, I find myself behaving similarly. While I simply don’t have the space for as much as we did at home, I’m clinging on to two extra large jars of starter here. About one and a half times the amount I need. I’m a mostly-grown woman entering summer acting like a starved squirrel preparing for winter. I try to be rational, to throw away some good, knowing that there is enough good left for more to grow. But it is as completely unnatural for me as it is for her.
This mindset, this inability to discard, plagues me in other ways. More important ways. I struggle to close doors — the inverse of a phrase often used in a positive sense, you know, leaving doors open. But when it comes to my potential, to my relationships, to my career, to my life, I’m realizing that being able to close doors is essential to actually making it over some doorstep, through some doorway, into another room, even if I’m not sure about the wallpaper in there. I get stuck staring at all of the open doors. How could I ever choose the right one? Sylvia Plath so perfectly captured this feeling through her fig tree metaphor in The Bell Jar: “I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Atilla and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
It’s become a popular quote, and rightfully so. I remember when I first read it, thinking, oh my god, yeah, that’s me, me too. Then I read some more of Sylvia’s writing, and then I learned some more about Sylvia, including that she took her own life at 30 years old.
Over the past month or so, “my fig tree” has become a trend on TikTok (mostly girls and women participating, and also my boyfriend) wherein one creates their own visual version of the metaphor, pasting different futures they can envision on top of figs in a photo of a fig tree. I’ve been playing that same game in my brain for years. The Bell Jar was published in 1963. 61 years later and the metaphor still resonates, the dilemma still finds a host in so many of us. She presented a pretty problem in a fleeting passage and didn’t bother to solve it for us. Perhaps it’s because the solution is so obvious, while the way through feels so hard — you cannot figure out your life by watching it, only by living it. Choosing one is hard, choosing none is worse. There is nothing wrong with your fig tree itself — in fact I believe life would be much less riveting without it — but there is danger in seeing the metaphor through (cue figs wrinkling, going black, plopping at your feet).
In my eyes, hope is one of the most crucial sentiments of all, one of the most necessary. For too long I have conflated possibilities and hope, as if the sheer quantity of possibilities in front of me determines how generally hopeful I feel, rather than what I now believe to be the truth: it is the choices we make, not the possibilities, that feed hope. When you stand at the crotch of the tree for too long, watching the figs but never reaching up, you starve. When you stare at all of the open doors for too long, scanning and measuring each, you trap yourself in a matrix of possibilities. You are the prison and the prisoner all at once. When you can’t discard, you just might drown in a swamp of starter.
It’s as easy and as hard as making a choice, as picking one fig, as walking through one door. This does not mean never returning to the fig tree, or throwing away the keys to the other doors. You just have to pick one fig and bite into it, pick one door and walk through it. Leave the rest, at least for now. Put the map to the fig tree in your pocket, wear the key ring like a charm bracelet. Remember those other figs, those other doors, those possibilities, and know they are there. And when you bite into that fig, you may very well find that it isn’t as juicy as you’d like it; when you walk through that chosen door, you may find that the lighting in that room is unexpectedly dreadful (bright white overhead light, for me). Fortunately, you can walk right back to your fig tree, where a new fig (a whole new possibility!) may have grown in place of the one you picked. You can walk right out of that same door you walked in through, or you might find that there’s a door into another room (a whole new possibility!) through this chosen door, one you didn’t know was there before, one you can only now open because you in fact made a choice.
To make a life choice is to let go, to give in. It requires some faith — faith in yourself first and foremost, faith in something bigger if it suits you. I do believe, most days, that there is some sort of current, if you will, beyond and around us all, that brushes and nudges and sometimes pushes us. The sort of current that has something to do with those things in your life that you can’t exactly believe, like how you came to cross paths with the people you love (the ones who you know you had to know, the ones who could not be anyone other than exactly who they are), like those unexpected experiences that have shaped parts of you, like those rare moments that feel like signs or messages, like that tugging feeling from your core towards something or someone. These inexplicable things happen because of choices we make, yes, but doesn’t it feel like something more too? It’s not precisely spiritual, and certainly not religious — I do not think this current is conscious, or strives for anything, or knows anything at all. I just think it is, and the more you give into it, the more you get out of it. Perhaps this is a story I tell myself to live, a narrative I like. That seems okay.
This is a fitting first post, because it feels like I’m walking through a door in sharing my writing. So far, I’m liking it in here …. are you???? Haha .. ha .. ha. I’m picking a fig. I hope it’s juicy. And if not, I can go back to the fig tree. I’m getting rid of some starter tonight too. I hope you’re in some room, chewing on some fig yourself. If not, what are you waiting for?
sometimes… you just gotta eat ALL the figs