Muffins to Cry Over

My wife is the most gracious person I know.  Really, I am not saying that to get back into her good graces, although I probably need to. She is the type person who takes in stray dogs and nurses them to health.  One time at our home in Quito we could count ten adopted strays.  Actually, there were only two to begin with, Blanca and Laddie, then Blanca and Laddie parented a litter of eight! It was great fun for our four-year-old daughter as she dressed the puppies in crocheted sweaters and hats intended for her dolls. Those dogs were well cared for and became great pets for some folks in Quito, all thanks to my wife’s gracious spirit and willingness to care. But, that’s another story for another day.

Today she baked some delicious muffins.  I grabbed one quickly because I knew that the two dozen muffins would probably be destined for the door of a new neighbor, or a mother who had given birth, or to someone who needed a word of encouragement. 

When she starts baking in mass I usually ask, "who died?" We have a deep freezer that creaks like the lid of an old coffin when opened. There we normally keep our death stash of frozen baked items for such sad occasions, but we had used up most of it during the recent pandemic. To be fair, the freezer also stores food for happy occasions, like births and baptisms and such. This time those delicious cranberry nut muffins were for a neighbor we had yet to meet as she had just moved across the street yesterday. “Do you really need to give away a whole dozen?” I selfishly asked.

Betsy returned after about half an hour with tears in her eyes. “What’s wrong?” imagining that she might have encountered some rudeness or misunderstanding.  You never know when you are making a cold call at the door what you will find.

  “Our new neighbor saw me at the door and immediately started crying,” she said with tears in her own eyes.  It seems that this neighbor’s husband had died unexpectedly just a few weeks ago and this was her first day alone in her new residence. Her children all lived out of the area and she was obviously in the throes of grief.

After hearing this story, I felt some pangs of guilt at having complained about watching so many muffins disappear from our house. I wish I hadn’t eaten the one muffin I did (but it was delicious, even with the guilt).

 I also felt a sense of pride in my wife who merely wanted to welcome a new neighbor and became a caring friend offering muffins and tears of sympathy.