Unexpected Stories

Cupcake, anyone?

~ Bri Sperry-Renfrew ~ 3 Comments

I answered the knock at the door.  It was the little girl who lives a few houses down the street.  She is about nine, ever so slightly chubby, and pretty – a dishwater blonde with light mocha skin and hazel eyes that belied a hint of nervousness on this occasion.  She lifted the contents of each hand towards me –  a plastic lavender tackle box-style of purse in one, and a shallow box of muffins in the other.   “Would you like to buy some cupcakes?” she asked in a lackluster voice.

“Oh, they’re cupcakes,” I mentally corrected myself.  Very browned cupcakes.  I took note of the fact that the little saleswoman apparently subscribes to my own cupcake philosophy; i.e., a naked cupcake is a better cupcake.  Frosting is superfluous.   I also noticed the cupcake liners were a Christmas theme.

I remembered the last time she knocked on our door trying to sell something – a well-worn backpack.  I turned down that offer.  This time I turned to go grab some change, and instantly two sides of an internal dialogue grabbed for my allegiance.   The Pollyanna side argued that she is a budding entrepreneur.  “Someday she will eat steak and ice cream three times a day!” it chirped.   The Roseanne side proffered that someone had sent her out to hock a few cupcakes and raise a little cash. “Don’t you get it?” it bleated.  “Last month – backpacks; today – cupcakes.  What will it be next week?  Toothbrushes?”  I ignored Roseanne and headed for my purse.

I returned with the change and selected my cupcake.  It felt like the proverbial rock, which is the same way my heart was beginning to feel.  I wondered if I should buy more or leave her with more to sell to other neighbors.  Was she at my door because she wanted to be or because someone else wanted her to be?

I closed the door and considered my 50 cent purchase.  I hoped someone might recommend frosting them next time.  Even though it’s not my preference it would probably help her sell more.  My husband, who was watching football in the family room, asked who was at the door.  I told him the story and plopped the cupcake into his hand.  (Was it my imagination, or did it land with a thud?)  He tried to break off a bite, but it crumbled between his fingers.  Cornbread.  My favorite.  I regretted not buying more, but my palate was not the reason.

La Señora Loca con la Cámara

~ Bri Sperry-Renfrew ~ 6 Comments

It begs for a story…
This is the same field of flowers pictured in my last blog, except when I took that photo these easy chairs had yet to be dumped beside them. Not long after I took the first photo, I was doing my regular afternoon drive to pick up the kids from school, when I noticed what looked like a pile of junk. At that time the chairs were bowed over kissing the dirt, their tan under bottoms disguising their true blue identity. Breezing past, I couldn’t even tell they were chairs. By the time the kids and I drove back by on our way home, the chairs had been righted, perfectly positioned as if looking out a giant picture window.
I like to imagine they were set there for me – that the migrants working across the road had peered out from underneath their wide-brimmed hats and spied me with my camera that day. Maybe one of them said, “La senora loca con la cámara!” But the other one, the one who worked the fields out of a love for the land and the flowers, said, “Su corazon es capturado por las flores. Tengo una idea.”

And that is how the two blue recliners, one for me and one for my muse, came to be a roadside fixture.

The Secret of Dirt

~ Bri Sperry-Renfrew ~ 3 Comments

I have not been a barren woman. I have been blessed with more chairs around my kitchen table than I ever imagined. My womb has known the twinges and tugs of life grasping and straining existence from my own. Yet it is the image of barrenness that clutches at my viscera today.

School has resumed and with it my commute. I transport my seedlings. Twenty-two minutes we drive, past an air force base and a salt mine, but mostly past fields. I relish this time. I am reminded of my rural roots – the wheat, corn and alfalfa fields that yielded up life for me, my family, the neighbors down the road. The acres I drive past today grow flowers, shrubs and plants I can’t even identify – a reminder that at times I, too, have been a seed carried by seasonal breezes.
I am fascinated by the fields in their various stages of growth: some newly sprouted, some ready to be harvested, and stages in between. But it is not the perfect rows of blooming flowers or the determined little sprouts that capture my attention as I drive today. It is the fallow fields, the barren, the ones that have known the slicing blades of the plow. They are brown and empty – or stubbly with the yellowed, dried remains of a crop they birthed in another season. They are not attractive like the verdant and flowering. They are exposed; their frail top layers heedlessly frolic with the fickle wind. Worst of all, they don’t appear to be fruitful. Aren’t appearances “everything?” Do these that are bare yearn to be visibly pregnant with life? Do they long to exemplify the produce of their fertility?
No, I am the one who is uncomfortable with the fallow season. I have been spoiled; I don’t like looking unfruitful, unnecessary. I haven’t learned the secret of dirt: to know to be content with the beauty of emptiness, with the necessity of invisible replenishing, with the purposeful cuts of the plow.

Memory Lessons from Life’s Cafe

~ Bri Sperry-Renfrew ~ 2 Comments

“Memory is a child walking along a seashore. You never can tell what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things.”

– Pierce Harris, Atlanta Journal

More and more my memory fails me. Ask my husband, my kids, my friend who went to a concert with me the other night. (“You were there?” I asked during my moment of temporary insanity.) The things I do remember seem to come from left field, those small, bizarre pebbles I must have picked up as a child – or in the following case, as a teenager. However, more and more I see that the things I do remember have a purpose. Its almost as if there was an angel sitting on my child-sized shoulder, whispering in my ear, “That motley one! Pick that one up! You’ll need it in 30 years.” Only the angel muttered the last part under its breath, so I never really knew why I picked up the pebble. Until now.
My daughter called the other night, rather discouraged with her new work in a trendy deli market. Her angst stoked my memory. I remembered my own job as a waitress in a small town restaurant. I was a teenager, a couple years younger than my daughter is now. The cooks, two tough broads, harassed me ceaselessly. I had no idea why I was the target of their incessant verbal abuse. I was a quick learner; I did a fairly decent job. I did forget to wear a slip under my dress one day, but I never saw how my increase in tips should have bothered them. There was also the time I spilled a bowl of soup in a guy’s lap. (He was a big city actor, in our neck of the woods with his troupe doing a performance at the request of our thriving Arts Council.) At least I was wearing a slip that day.
So, I made a couple of mistakes. Did it justify being mocked and berated every time I placed an order? I was just a shy kid trying to earn a buck. I was also a kid who was determined not to crumble under the harassment. I was determined to persevere, to prove myself. And I did. By the time I quit that job, I had those cooks eating out of my hand. Well, maybe not exactly, but they would at least sit at the same table with me and engage in civil conversation.
This story of perseverance, I thought, was the purpose of my memory. I encouraged my daughter to “hang in there,” prove what she’s made of. But even as I told her this, I was growing unsettled with my own answer. Perhaps the angel had returned to my adult shoulder and was shouting, “No, no! There’s something else.”
It was, as it turns out, maybe not about me. As I was telling my daughter about those two mean, crusty cooks, I remembered other things about them. They didn’t have the easiest of lives; one was well past the prime of life, the other was a struggling single parent. Those women needed compassion, they needed Jesus…just like the people my daughter works with – just like everybody.
As my daughter and I talked about this, I found myself hoping – hoping that she was picking up a memory to tell to her own daughter someday, and that maybe she’ll listen to the angel a little more closely than I did.

"Cows no have pants."

~ Bri Sperry-Renfrew ~ 3 Comments

“Cows no have pants” is the sage observation of my niece’s three-year-old son, and my quotidian quote for the day. It makes me think about pants from a whole new perspective. Three days ago my biggest pant concern was finding the right ones for my son’s school uniform. The day before that I had to pick up some new ones for my husband to wear on business appointments. Just yesterday I was frustrated that my own seemed to be getting a little too snug. Then, of course, there’s the routine care of sorting, washing, drying, ironing, and putting up pants in the course of family laundry duties. Until today, I had never stopped to consider that my dealing with pants only concerns the two-legged variety. I’m not sure how I would manage four pant legs, but… it’s fun to imagine!