The little jolt at heirloom sourdough starter.

The helpless softening at I talk to my starters.

He said it was like watching someone wake slowly from a nightmare and realize, item by item, that none of it had been real, that the monster was a coat on a chair, that the intruder was only the wind.

And there is no relief on earth quite like that particular relief, the collapse of a fear you had committed to whole, the flood of lightness when the terrible story you believed turns out to have been made of nothing.

I had spent an hour with my whole body clenched around dread.