My first purchase

I semi-impulsively bought peach kefir at a cheese shop in NYC. I've seen kefir other places, too, but traveling in a different city just gave me an excuse to finally try it again since the real stuff in Russia in 2009. I was worried it would be like drinking peach-flavored buttermilk, but actually, it was like having a tangy, drinkable peach yogurt. I was hooked to the taste, to the protein content, the probiotics.

Researching it online when I got back home from NYC, I learned that you could make your own kefir using kefir culture in regular milk. It also multiplies, and although you could pay for a pack of dehydrated culture or buy it off the "kefir lady" online and get it delivered padded in a small jar of milk, many kefir culturers end up sharing their overgrown kefir grains, for free.

So I joined neighborhood sharing sites that I'd read about in Time magazine: SnapGoods and NeighborGoods. However, the sites were confusing and my local network was basically unpopulated. So, of course, back to Craigslist.

Kefir grains from the soccer mom, purchased for $5

Craigslist DC, to my surprise, had the cheapest and most abundant kefir grains even compared to hipster Richmond, hippie Charlottesville, and homemade Williamsburg.

The $5 kefir grains was categorized under "health/beauty products," was sparsely in lowercase, and the location was "gmu," George Mason University.

If you go on Youtube and search how to make kefir, most of what you'll get is some young adult or middle-aged man straining kefir from a plastic jug. They have a medium or muscly build, because it's likely they're athletes drinking kefir like a daily protein shake.

So of course I imagined some tall basketball player coming out of his Mason dorm wearing socks and adidas flipflops, scooping out some of his kefir grains straight from his bottle of prepared kefir. The texts he sent were short and to the point, some words shortened like kids tend to do these days (and my parents, I should have thought) and he never tried to call me. The meeting place was outside of McDonalds at University Mall; who else but an unsupervised college youth would make McDonalds right outside of a college campus a meeting place?

Well, a soccer mom who takes her kids to McDonalds for fries or a sundae after an exhausted Saturday's game and is worried about strangers coming to her children's house, that's who.

We pulled into the driveway in front of McDonalds at the same time. She was a "cool mom" with Rivers Cuomo glasses and I could have sworn her daughter was wearing a soccer uniform coming out of the passenger seat. Although I'd come prepared with my jar of milk that the basketball player could just spoon the kefir grains into, she'd come more prepared: I had a good half cup of the stuff, chilled in a glass jar and banded with foil.

I was pleasantly surprised and grateful! After effusive thanks (returned with a observant, neutral gaze) I sheepishly handed the woman my $5 payment, feeling really, really stupid and juvenile: the payment was $5 in dimes, sealed in a plastic ziplock sandwich bag. "...You can count it, if you want..."