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Aoife quits everything and thinks there must be something wrong with her. The yoga mat in the corner has been gathering dust for months, a Spanish book rests splayed on the coffee table, and the bag of knitting supplies by the couch hasn’t been opened since she stopped her hat mid-project. She quit violin, and painting class, and gymnastics. She took up Krav Maga for two weeks. She’s decided she wants to grow mushrooms.

She buys the mason jars and the rye and is grateful she didn’t toss out the pressure cooker when she lost interest in culinary exploration. There’s a meditative quality to the preparation, and she hums as she hammers nails through the lids and covers them with tape and measures out the substrate. She makes a still air box and wipes down every surface with isopropyl and sprays disinfectant until her eyes burn before carefully injecting the first of the spores. Then she waits.

The entire first batch is lost to contamination, the spindling fibers of white mycelium giving way to black pin mold and trichoderma. She spends a weekend cleaning — gives away the yoga mat, and the jigsaw puzzles, and the knitting supplies — and buys a heater for the closet. In her second try, half the jars make it to colonization, so she fills a monotub with coir that she pasteurizes on the stove and waits for the mycelium to colonize again. When she notices pins she introduces the fruiting conditions, reading up on fresh-air exchange and misting and lighting to encourage growth direction.

Her first flush a success, Aoife cuts the stems close to the coir and smiles at her accomplishment. She buys plates of agar and different spores and harvests one flush, then another.

The interest lasts six months. Aoife learns everything she can about the teks: how some people grow using bags of ready rice, what the most common contaminants are, and how to avoid pinning on the sides of the fruiting tub. She wakes up one morning and the fascination is gone: misting is too much effort, and there’s a part of her that hopes her colonizing jars will fail to contamination.

Aoife quits growing mushrooms. It’s not until she’s at the store one day, putting a paper bag of shiitake in her cart, that she realizes maybe it’s okay for her interests to be transitory; maybe it’s okay for her to change.