the big jar

My roommate likes to grow things. In jars. When I moved in, I noticed a jar perched on the corner cupboard. A big glass jar full of a dark liquid and something floating in it. I didn't try to figure out what it was. A couple of days later, my roommate got on top of a chair and took the big jar down. A mushroom! oh dear, that floating thing is a mushroom. She set the jar on the table and went to the refrigerator and grabbed the pitcher she had been drinking from every day. She lifted the cloth covering the big jar, and carefully poured the dark liquid into the pitcher.

"What is that?" I asked.
"Kombucha tea."
"What?"
"It's really good for you," she began. This is never a good start. She said something about good bacteria and your body and maybe something about digestion or your immune system. She explained that the mushroom fermented the tea and made a drink with quite an acidic bite, which you then consume daily for heath reasons. I then watched her drink her daily dose. Her mouth puckered and her eyes squished down to her nose, which flinched. She smacked her lips and stuck out her tongue and shook her head. Every day, she suffered through a glass of that god-awful drink.

One day, she brought the big jar down to work on her mixture. (I found the directions on our fridge -- there's a lot of splitting mushroom colonies and harvesting and something about the "mother colony" and tasting for "bite.")
"Oh no! My tea is moldy, Sherry," she said.
"It's a mushroom," I said. "It is fungus."
"No," she said, not at all appreciating my quick wit, "There is mold floating in the tea."

It turns out something had gone wrong with something, and the tea had mold floating on the top. To me, the mold didn't seem any more offensive than the floating mushroom colony, but I guess even health nuts draw the line somewhere, because that day, Danae poured the whole thing down the drain.