There is a jar in my kitchen with a date written on the lid, and a friend of thirty years everyone — me first — called the woman who never finishes anything. The jar is her thirty-first year of finishing something.
The door on unit 214 came up and neither of us said anything for a second because the smell was cardboard and cold concrete and the light in there was the kind that comes off a bare bulb in a metal room.
Ten by fifteen. Full to about shoulder height and about two feet back from the door.
“Okay,” Rilla said.
“How long has this been here?”
“Twenty-fifteen.” She had a coffee in each hand and she gave me one. “It was supposed to be four months.”
“Rilla, that’s eleven years.”
“I know it.”
“At what a month?”
“A hundred and eighteen.” She drank some of her coffee. “Don’t.”
I did the arithmetic in the car afterward, which is the kind of thing I do. Fifteen thousand five hundred and seventy-six dollars.
I run a community land trust in Duluth. I started it in 2001 and I have run it for twenty-five years and we hold two hundred and fourteen units, which are permanently affordable, which means a ground lease and a resale formula and a restriction that stays on the land after everybody currently alive is dead. That is the whole of my professional life. I make things that cannot be undone.
I have carried one sentence about Rilla Ostrander since we were about twenty-six, and it is six words long: she never finishes anything.
I could give you the file. She left the bakery two years in. There is a manuscript on a drive somewhere that stopped at forty-one thousand words in 2009. She incorporated a nonprofit in 2011 and did not file the second year’s paperwork. Six cities. Four of them twice. And a room off Central Entrance she paid for from Montana, California, Louisiana, and Duluth, containing eleven things she started, none of which she has looked at since she put them in there.
The twenty-fifth anniversary of the trust was the twentieth of June. I had a speech written since April. I write my own and I do not use notes and I have given some version of that speech at eleven annual meetings, four legislative hearings, and a national conference in Cleveland, and the founding part of it has not changed since about 2004 because it does not need to.
Two hundred and fourteen units. Forty-one of them have turned over twice. There is a house on Sixth Street that has had three families in it since 2007 and every one of them bought it for something a working person could carry, and that is not luck, that is the formula on the deed, and the formula is the whole of what I know how to do.
And in March of 2011 she asked me for something, once, over lunch, and I said no, and in fifteen years I have never told anybody what I said or why. It has to go in here.
The four letters came at me in May of 2022 at Deb Mazur’s fiftieth, at a rented place up the shore. Deb has known all of us since 1991 and Deb says things. She said them about Rilla, out loud, across a table with nine people at it, and she meant it kindly, the way you would say somebody has good hair.
I did not look them up. I want to be accurate about why and it was not skepticism. I had a sentence that was six words long and it had been doing a job for twenty-six years, which is that it kept me from having to think about a lunch in 2011.
ENFP Traits: The Starter
In June of 1996 three of us opened a bakery.
Rilla and Emmett Sarkela and me, twenty-four years old, in a building on Superior Street with a deck oven a guy in Cloquet sold us for nine hundred dollars. It is still open. It is worker-owned and the people running it now were not born when we signed the lease.
The starter got made that first week. Rilla made it. Flour and water in a crock and then eleven days of feeding it, and she stood there on about day nine, stirring it with a wooden spoon, and she said:
“This is what I am, you know. I’m the starter.”
I laughed. Emmett laughed. It was funny at twenty-four. I have repeated that line at four weddings and one funeral and I have always repeated it the same way, which is as a charming thing my friend said about herself once, and In thirty years it never occurred to me that she was telling me something.
We had that crock on a shelf by the proof box and for the first month everything we made was terrible. Emmett wanted to buy commercial yeast and be done with it and Rilla would not have it, and it was not sentiment — she had read something, she had a theory about the water, and she was standing there at eleven at night on a Tuesday with a spoon while the two of us wanted to go home.
That starter is still alive. It has been fed continuously since June of 1996.
Here is the custody, which I know because I asked the current head baker in June and she had it written on the inside of a cabinet door. Rilla, then me, then a woman named Toivi who is dead now, then Emmett for four months which everybody agrees was a mistake, then a run of six people through the early two-thousands, then Danielle for eleven years, then a kid named August, then Danielle again, then the two who have it now. Twenty-one people. Four of them are dead. Two of them have never met anybody else on that list. If the building had burned in 2003 it would be gone, and every loaf that has come out of that oven for thirty years came out of a crock a twenty-four-year-old made in eleven days and then walked away from.
ENFP Relationships and Compatibility: Being Left Warmly
Being loved by one of these goes like this. You are seen, accurately, at a level almost nobody else manages, and you are never once fought with.
She has never raised her voice at me. In thirty-five years. Not when I deserved it, and there were four or five occasions.
That reads as a virtue and I want to lay out the other half of it plainly, because I have lived on the receiving end for three and a half decades. She leaves warmly. She left the bakery warmly. She left Duluth in 2003 warmly and in 2011 warmly, and each time there was a dinner and a hug and a real one, and then she was in Missoula. And because there is no fight, there is no accounting, and because there is no accounting, you never find out what you were to her or whether a decision got made about you.
I have wondered for years whether Rilla thinks about me when I am not in front of her. There is no way to find out. I have never asked, because the question cannot be put to a person who is that warm when she is in the room — you would sound like you were asking for reassurance, and you would get it, immediately and sincerely, and it would settle nothing.
The one time I came close was 2013, in her car outside my house, and what I actually said was that she was hard to plan around. She said, “I know. I’m sorry.” She meant it. She was in Duluth for eleven months that year and then she was not.
Married to it, at one address every night rather than across thirty-five years and six of hers, is a different chair and a different account, and it can only be told by whoever occupied that chair. And a household and a friendship do not make the same use of the same warmth.
Her mother died in 2019 and Rilla drove from New Orleans in twenty-two hours and then did the entire thing — the church, the hall, her aunts, the house — and was excellent at it, and left on the fourth day. I sat with her father twice a week for a year after that. I am not saying that to be admired for it. I am saying that the pattern is the pattern.
ENFP vs ENTP: Two People Who Quit
Both of them walked out of that bakery inside three years, and since 1999 I have filed the two departures under a single heading, and that was wrong, and I did not work it out until June.
Emmett left in the spring of 1999 and it took nine months. Three memos. He called a meeting about it. He had a whole argument about scale and about whether a single-location cooperative was a defensible structure, and he was not wrong, and he made it at volume to everybody including two customers. And the thing is that Emmett built the ownership structure in 1997 — the buy-in, the vesting schedule, how a member exits — and that structure is the entire reason there is a bakery on Superior Street in 2026, and he built it in four months of argument that nearly ended all three of us.
What happened, near as I can tell, is that once he had it worked out, he was done. Not bored. Done. The problem was solved and staying was doing the solved thing over and over, and he could not make himself, and instead of saying that he argued about scale for nine months.
Rilla left in the fall of 1998 and it took eleven minutes on the loading side by the dumpster.
There was no memo. There was no meeting. She said she was going to go do something else and that we would be fine, and she was in the shop that Saturday buying a boule, and she came to the Christmas thing, and she has been in that building probably four hundred times since.
I asked her that afternoon what had happened. She said nothing had happened. I asked whether it was money, and she said no. I asked whether it was Emmett, and she took a while on that one and said no. Eleven minutes, and I could not have told you at the end of it what I had been told.
Emmett has started eleven things since 1999 and he is in litigation over two of them and there are four people from those ventures who will not be in a room with him. He is fifty-five and he ice sails on the bay in February, alone, at speeds I will not repeat, and he has done that since he was nineteen and has never once explained it to anybody and does not appear to think it requires explaining.
Rilla has started eleven things since 1998 and every single person from every single one of them still loves her and not one of them could tell you what she actually did.
They run the same engine. What decides when to leave is not the same organ. Emmett’s is a working model of the thing itself, and when the model is complete the interest goes out of it like a light. Rilla’s is a judgment about whether the thing deserves to exist and about who ought to be holding it — and once she has settled both of those she hands it over, and she does not experience the handing as a loss, and she does not tell the person receiving it that a decision was made about them.
Swap the two and neither departure is available. Emmett cannot hand a thing off, because handing off means assessing the person you are handing it to, and his instrument assesses ideas. And Rilla could not have built the 1997 structure. That took four months of argument, and she has no appetite for argument and, I think, no equipment for it. She does not build the mechanism. She rules on whether a thing has a right to be there.
ENFP Strengths and Weaknesses: Lunch, March 2011
The strength is the generation and it is not a small thing and I have never given it its due.
In eleven days in 1996 a twenty-four-year-old made a culture that has fed a neighborhood for thirty years. In four months in 2011 she incorporated a nonprofit that does not exist anymore and whose one program — a ride share for dialysis patients out of the Hillside — was picked up by the county in 2014 and runs today under a different name with two vans.
She does that. She has done it eleven times. Every one of the eleven is still standing and her name is on none of them.
The dialysis thing is the one I know from the inside, because we shared a printer that year. Somebody at the clinic told her that three people on the Hillside were missing sessions because the bus does not run at five in the morning in February. Eleven weeks later there was a phone number, a schedule, eight drivers, a magnet, and an arrangement with a church for a van. She did the incorporation herself off a form and got two of the articles wrong. By the following spring she had handed the schedule to a woman named Chandra and stopped answering the phone, and the county took the whole thing over in 2014 and it runs today with two vans and a paid coordinator.
Ask anyone at the county who started it. They will tell you it was a community initiative.
Now.
March of 2011. She was thirty-nine, she was back in Duluth, she was broke in a way she was very cheerful about, and she asked me to lunch, which she does not do, and at the end she asked me for the outreach position.
We had the money. I had been sitting on the position since November.
And I said no, and I was extremely kind about it, and I took about six minutes to do it. I said things about the arc of the role and about wanting somebody who would still be there in five years and about how the board would see it. And then I gave her the six words. Gently, at a table, to her face, with my hand on her hand.
I said, “Ril, you don’t finish things.”
She said, “That’s fair.”
She paid for the lunch, which I have thought about since. Then that afternoon I told Marge Halvorson and Pete Dziedzic why I was going another direction, and I used the same six words, and I want to be exact here: I was not being cruel and I was not being careful either. I was being relieved. I had had a reason ready for fifteen years and I finally got to use it.
She left Duluth in July. She has not asked me for anything before or since.
ENFP Careers: The Résumé, Read Right
Eleven things in twenty-eight years and here is the pattern, which I did not see until I had them all on one page in June.
Every one of them was a thing nobody was doing. Every one of them she got running to about the point where it had a name, a phone number, and a first person who was not her. And then somewhere between month eight and month twenty-six she was gone, and every one of them survived.
Nobody has ever paid that woman for the part she is good at, because the part she is good at does not come in job form. It is the eleven days before there is a job.
Whether a payroll can hold a thing like that, and what a lifetime of the answer leaves behind by fifty-four, belongs to somebody who writes job descriptions for a living. I have written about ninety of them and I have never once written that one. And two people can be identically good at the first eleven days and find that a labor market has entirely different uses for them.
She does intake at a clinic now, three days a week, and has since 2023. She is very good at it. She knows which of the regulars needs the appointment read back to them twice and which one will not come in if you ask about the husband. Everybody in that building thinks she is wonderful and not one of them has any idea what she is.
She is on nobody’s board. She has never been given an award. There is no line on a résumé anywhere that says began, correctly, and left in time.
ENFP Behavior: Unit 214
We cleared that unit on a Saturday in June, the sixth, and it took us most of six hours, and I went in there braced.
What was in there: a road bike with no crank. Four Rubbermaid tubs of fabric. A box of loose photographs and eleven sealed boxes of somebody else’s photographs, which she bought at an estate sale in Cloquet in 2004 and has never opened, and when I asked she said she keeps meaning to find out who they are, which is what she said in 2006 and in 2013. Two milk crates of records. A guitar amp. The dialysis nonprofit’s whole file drawer. Camping gear for four people. A sewing machine in the box.
And a banker’s box with the flaps folded over each other, which I opened at about two in the afternoon while she was outside on the phone.
There was a spiral notebook in it. Green cover. On the front in her handwriting it says HOUSING — start here.
Sixty-one pages, front and back, in ink, dated across four months in 1999.
There are notes from three meetings in the Twin Cities. There is a page of arithmetic on median rents in the Hillside in 1999. There are two pages headed BURLINGTON with the date she drove out there and the name of the woman she met with and a diagram of how a ground lease separates the land from the house. On page forty-one there is a resale formula. Twenty-five percent of appreciation to the seller, the rest stays with the unit.
That is our formula. That is the formula on two hundred and fourteen deeds in this county with my signature on the bottom of them.
And folded into the back cover there is a page addressed to me, dated the ninth of November, 1999, that was never sent. It is four lines. It says she is not going to be the person who does this, and that I should have it, and then it says:
You’ll actually do it, because you need something to be for.
She came back in from the parking lot and asked if I wanted a sandwich.
The anniversary dinner was the twentieth. Two hundred and some people at the DECC, a slideshow, a plaque for Marge, and my speech, which I had written in April and did not change.
I told the founding the way I have told it for twenty-five years. Rilla was at table nine with Deb and the Sarkelas. When I got to the part about 1999 she clapped, and afterward she came up and put both hands on my shoulders and said it was a good speech, and it was a good speech.
The notebook has been in the second drawer of my desk since the sixth of June.
What Is the ENFP Personality Type: Sixty-One Pages
In July I finally went and read about those four letters. Four years after a rented kitchen up the shore, and eleven days after I gave that speech. Counted nationally it is about eight in a hundred — and in the later study samples, the most common type among women.
E — the generator faces out. Everything out there is a live option, all the time, and that describes a condition she operates in rather than a mood she is having.
N — and what comes in is never the thing itself, only what the thing could turn into. A woman at a bakery counter in 1999 says her landlord sold the building. Most people hear a sad story. She heard sixty-one pages.
F — and then something private and exact decides which of the options deserve anything, and that decision is not up for discussion and never gets stated.
P — nothing is closed, which is why there is a road bike with no crank, and which is also why there is a road bike at all.
Beneath the letters the framework lays out four working parts, ordered by endowment. Here the generation draws down very nearly the entire allotment, the private valuation does the steering, the organizing arrives in bursts and then quits, and whatever holds on to what has already been built has less in it than anybody I have known.
Which is why I have had the starter backwards for thirty years.
A starter is a different object from a loaf and it has a different job. You feed it, it lives, it makes everything in the building rise, and it cannot be baked. If you put a starter in an oven you get a brick and you have destroyed the starter. In 2011 I sat across a table from one and told her she did not finish things and offered her a job that was three years of maintaining something that was already running.
She said that was fair. She was not being gracious. She agreed with me.
On the count: about eight in a hundred, women outnumbering men. As for the other percentages in circulation, I write needs assessments for a living and the first question is always who was in the room. Every one of those tables got collected off whoever showed up to be measured — people who hunted the thing down themselves, people whose workplace paid to have them assessed — and you do not set policy off the people who came to the meeting.
The appraisal, since appraising is half my trade. Something real is going on underneath it: take a person’s four readings, take them again a month on, and the second set comes in a few points off the first — tighter than two appraisals on the same building. The four letters themselves hold for two people in three, which is honest work and not gospel. The soft place is the last step, the one where four readings turn into sixteen named kinds of person. Somebody drafted those sixteen. In my line that is a covenant and not a finding. It binds because it was written down, not because it was ever proved.
And all of it describes a category. You are a household. The place where the description does not cover you is not a defect in it, and it is the only line in the whole thing that was ever about you, and I would sit down with that line.
ENFP Under Stress: The Winter She Called It All Nothing
The winter of 2012 she was in Missoula and it was bad, and it went on from about January to the middle of March, and I got a lot of phone calls at eleven at night.
What she gave me was an inventory. Everything she had ever started, in order, each item carrying a verdict, and the verdict every time was nothing. The bakery was nothing, she just made flour paste and left. The dialysis thing was nothing, the county was going to do it anyway. Nineteen ninety-nine was nothing. Nineteen ninety-six was nothing.
None of it was self-pity, and the absence of self-pity is what I could not handle. It was delivered flat, like a person reading a list of assets that had been written down to zero, and every item on it was factually distorted and she could not be moved off any of them.
That is what happens when a person with no instrument for the accumulated past is forced to look at it. She does not have a working relationship with what she has already done. Most days that is why she can start the twelfth thing without the weight of the eleven. And when something gets in under her, the past does not come back as a record. It comes back as a verdict, and it is always the same verdict, and there is nothing in her equipped to check it against what actually happened.
I drove to the bakery that February and copied the custody list off the inside of the cabinet door and read all twenty-one names to her over the phone, in order, with the years.
She said, “That’s Danielle, though.” Which is true. It is Danielle. It has been Danielle or somebody like Danielle for twenty-eight years, and the reason there is a Danielle is a crock on a shelf and eleven nights in June of 1996, and there is nothing in that woman capable of holding those two facts at the same time when the weather is in her.
And a thing said plainly here, because I was on the other end of that phone for nine weeks and I told myself it was a rough patch. A rough patch lifts. If it does not lift — if somebody is still writing everything down to zero in month four, and sleep has gone, and the verdicts have quit having anything to do with what happened — then no friend on a telephone can reach it and nothing set down on this page can either. That belongs to a physician, and to somebody holding a counseling license. It is a sentence that costs nothing to say early, so I am saying it.
It lifted in March. She got a job at a nursery and started something.
ENFP Cognitive Functions: Where the Leaving Comes From
The first part is the generation and it is nearly the whole of her. By the book the four run extraverted intuition, introverted feeling, extraverted thinking, introverted sensing, in that order, and the jar is the second one.
Everything in front of her stands as a live option, and those options are testable rather than dreamed, which is why she starts things. Starting is how she finds out. She does not sit with an idea. She opens a bakery.
The second part is the one I have been calling unreliability since 1998. It is a valuation. Private, and finer than anything I could run.
That is where the leaving comes from. It is not boredom and I have to give up boredom, which I have been using since 1998. In 1998 she settled two questions — whether a bakery on Superior Street deserved to exist, and who ought to be running it — and once both were settled there was nothing left for her to do there. In 1999 she settled the same two questions about a housing trust that did not exist yet, and I was the answer to the second one, and I got a notebook and no explanation.
Which is the part I cannot get comfortable with. She decided in November of 1999 what I was and what I needed and she was correct, and she handed me my working life, and she has never mentioned it in twenty-seven years. There was no conversation in which I could have said no. I have been assigned by a friend who reads people better than anybody I know and who does not experience reading them as an act that involves them.
The third part organizes, hard, and then stops. Six weeks of the bakery’s first spring were run entirely by her and it was the best six weeks that building ever had.
And the fourth is the accumulated past and there is almost nothing in it, and that is not carelessness. She does not carry it. She cannot get at it. It is why she can start again at fifty-four and it is why a bad winter can convince her that thirty years were nothing.
She told me in June, in the car, that Emmett had nothing to do with why she left in 1998.
I do not believe that. I have thought that man ran her off since the day she went and I have no intention of stopping now.
ENFP Personal Growth: A Jar
The published growth advice for this one is follow-through and staying in the room, and I have watched a woman who cannot stay in the room read a good deal of it and agree with every word.
What I can testify to is one item, eleven minutes long, in November of 1999.
She sat down and wrote a page to me. Four lines. She did the thing she has never done before or since, which is to say out loud what she had decided and who she had decided it about. And then she folded it into the back of a notebook and put the notebook in a box, and the box went to Montana and California and Louisiana and back, and it sat in a metal room off Central Entrance for eleven years at a hundred and eighteen dollars a month.
So it is in her. She got all the way to the page. What she has no equipment for is the six inches between a written page and a hand.
I have not told her. I have had it in the second drawer since the sixth of June and I have had eleven reasons and this week I am down to one, which is that if I tell her she will say something warm and kind and true, and she will mean it, and it will not cost her anything, and I want it to cost her something. That is where I am, at fifty-four, and I am not proud of it and I have not shifted off it yet.
She goes to Ashland the second week of September. It is an hour and twenty minutes, which she has pointed out twice.
What I keep coming back to is that she got all the way to the page in 1999 and then the page went in a box, and I have had the notebook in a drawer since June, and the distance from a drawer to a hand is the same six inches either way. I have been telling myself for twenty-seven years that she is the one who does not finish. I have had eleven weeks and one drawer.
Wednesday I went into the bakery and stood in line behind four people and asked the girl at the counter if I could buy some starter. She said they give it away. She asked if I had a jar and I did not, so she sold me one for two dollars and put about a cup of it in and screwed the lid on and told me to feed it that night and every day after.
I did it at the counter at home at nine o’clock, flour and water, the way I was taught in 1996 by a twenty-four-year-old with a wooden spoon.
Then I got a marker out of the drawer and wrote the date on the lid.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.