Marking Time
Photos/Genevie Durano.
By Genevie Durano
The loss of a sense of time started to creep in around Day 15 of the lockdown, which began in earnest on March 15. It had been two weeks since I’d been to my office, since I’d had any kind of routine. Those first 14 days had the sheen of novelty. It was the length of a vacation—a jaunt overseas or a long road trip to visit family on the other side of the country. It didn’t feel like real life.
Southern Nevada wasn’t getting the kind of numbers that New York City was seeing. There was still a sense, when April 1 came around, that the pandemic, while certainly serious, can still be contained. We had not yet quite reached a point of demarcation, of a life before and a life after.
The third week began with a slow dawning of disorientation. Abandoned in a corner of my desk was my leather-covered planner, the life force that had powered my days, propelling me from one task to the next, a meticulous keeper of doctor’s appointments, deadlines, school events, meals with friends. Now there was no sense looking at it, because there was nothing to fill it with. School was out, and there were no work meetings, brunches or weekend hiking plans. The days became a blur with no distinguishing features—Monday is Wednesday is Saturday—and on and on it went. With no school to guide him, my teenage son became a nocturnal creature, haunting the fridge at 3 am, greeting the day at 2 pm. Inside our house, we were adrift in a cocoon of air conditioned safety, where time existed in a soft-focus liminal state.
As a writer and editor of more than two decades, my life is marked by deadlines. I am ever cognizant of time and its precision. It is an immutable force in my existence, or, at least it was before the pandemic. Now I felt unmoored without its signifiers. Sure, I still had work to do and stories to write, but I lacked the routines that gave contour to my days. By the fourth week, I knew that I had to stop waiting for life to restart, so instead I made a starter … as in, a sourdough starter.
I come from a family that places food in its center of gravity. Some of my earliest memories as a child were running to my mother after dinner and giving her a kiss, in appreciation for a delicious meal. “Kiss the cook!” was indeed the thing that we said and did every night, my father leading the parade. Food was my mother’s love language, and she doled it out generously. She poured her soul into every dish, never tiring of making dinner night after night.
My mother passed on her love of cooking to my sister, who went on to culinary and pastry school and became a chef. Though I never had a natural knack for the culinary arts, I did have a great appreciation for it. My stock-in-trade was in words, so I wrote about food instead. In the eight years I’ve been a food writer and editor in Las Vegas, I’ve had the good fortune to eat in the city’s many restaurants. A well-made meal, whether it comes from a mom-and-pop eatery or cooked by a celebrity chef, always feels like a gift to me. It’s not just food on a plate—it’s creativity and expression, it’s sustenance imbued with hope and dreams, it’s the purest expression of love you can share with a loved one, or a stranger.
During the lockdown, I needed something to delineate the days within the confines of my kitchen. Improvised meals were not my forte, it turns out. I needed the fastidiousness of a well-written recipe. Baking was more my calling. I was drawn to its exactitude, its unambiguity. The world was already uncertain enough; I needed the precision of a kitchen scale that spoke in grams and ounces.
So, the sourdough starter, which, due to the scarcity of commercial yeast (it appears everyone in the world hit on the same idea at once), became my lifeline. It took nine days of devotion—feeding the slurry with carefully measured water and flour at 12-hour intervals—to successfully capture wild yeast in the air and strengthen it enough so it can leaven bread.
My son joked that I fed the starter more than I fed him, which made me laugh, because I don’t think I’ve been so vigilant about anything since my son was a newborn.
I kept the container next to my laptop as I worked and watched the starter change before my eyes, carefully monitoring expansion and growth, appalled at first by the sour aroma of fermentation, then comforted by it. It unexpectedly evoked a memory that I hadn’t thought about in years: When I was in college, my mother had given me a jar of something—back then I didn’t know what it was for—and told me to take care of it and to feed it. I promptly forgot about the mystery jar until weeks later, when I opened it and recoiled from the smell. It was the dormant starter, starved to death. Now I know it was my mother’s starter.
When I made my first loaf of sourdough, I thought of my mother, who moved around the kitchen with grace and aplomb, who, through sheer will and love, could conjure anything out of thin air—stews, noodle dishes, and yes, bread. I struggled with this first attempt—and many subsequent ones—unsure what it was supposed to look or feel like. Did I knead the dough enough or did I knead it too much? I wished my mother were there to guide me; I wished I could turn back time to when I was younger, so I could pay more attention when she tried to teach me something in the kitchen.
But here I am now, in lockdown, and I, too, can conjure something out of thin air, if I was willing to fail and try again. Time is a curious thing—my weeks began to have shape again as I marked the days not with my planner, but with my breadmaking schedule. On Thursdays and Fridays, I feed and strengthen my starter; on Saturdays, I make the dough and let it proof overnight. Sunday mornings are for baking, the warm, yeasty smell filling my kitchen, defusing the chaos that lies just outside my door. Each week I learn something new about the process of making bread—it’s a mercurial thing that defies replication, at least in my amateur hands.
“Are you glad you became a baker during the pandemic?” my son asked me one Sunday morning.
“I am,” I said, though I hadn’t thought of myself as a baker until he said it.
“Me, too,” he said. “I’ll always remember this time for everything you’ve made.”
Genevie Durano was born in the Philippines and moved to the United States when she was 12. After graduating from the University of Arizona with a creative writing degree, she lived in Europe, Utah, and San Francisco. With a goal to work in publishing, she moved to New York City, where she edited for various consumer magazines including Us Weekly, Teen People, and TV Guide. A resident of Las Vegas since 2012, she has worked for publications such as Vegas Rated, Vegas Seven, Modern Luxury’s Vegas, and the Las Vegas Review-Journal. She is currently the food editor at Las Vegas Weekly magazine.
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