A Piedmont Porchlight Story

The Coffee Cup was busy enough that Hattie was carrying two coffee pots; one in each hand. I don’t know how she did it. I was pretty sure she didn’t either.

Curtis Pope looked up as she hurried by. “Hattie, have you got a minute?”

“I’ve got about thirty-seven seconds.”

“Good enough.”

She stopped beside our booth. “What’s on your mind?”

Curtis leaned across the table. “I’ve got a question.”

“Oh Lord, that sounds dangerous.”

“Where does all the Tupperware go?”

She stared at him. “The what?”

“The bowls. The lids. The ones folks take to church suppers.”

She didn’t answer. She just looked at him. Finally, she said, “You’ve noticed too?”

I laughed. “Oh Lord, there’s a story here.”

Hattie slid into the booth. “I’ve been trying to solve that mystery for twenty-five years.”

Curtis nodded. “My wife says we started out with eighteen bowls.”

“How many you got now?”

“Three. And, not one of ’em matches another.”

Hattie pointed at him. “Exactly. You’ve got two blue lids. One yellow bowl. Something that used to be clear. And one square container nobody remembers buying.”

The three of us started laughing. Funny thing about church suppers. Nobody ever left hungry. But somehow, the Tupperware never all made it home.

“I think it starts innocent enough,” I said. “You take banana pudding to Homecoming.” “You come home with somebody else’s potato salad.”

Curtis nodded. “Then next month, that bowl goes to the revival. It comes back full of coleslaw. But it ain’t your bowl no more. It’s somebody else’s.”

Hattie folded her arms. “I don’t think anybody actually steals Tupperware.”

“No?”

“I think it just changes denominations.” That one about finished me. Curtis wiped his eyes.

“Hattie, that’s the funniest thing you’ve said all week.”

She smiled. “I ain’t finished.”

“Oh Lord…”

She looked around the Coffee Cup. “I believe somewhere there’s one little old church lady who’s got every bowl in Calhoun County.”

We all laughed. “She don’t mean to. She just opens her cabinet, and thinks ‘well now, I don’t remember buyin’ that one.'”

About then Earl Johnson wandered in carrying a covered dish. Hattie pointed. “Earl.” He stopped. “Yeah?”

“Whose bowl is that?”

He looked down. “I don’t rightly know.”

Curtis looked at me. “Case closed.”

Earl shrugged. “It had peach cobbler in it.”

“Does it now?”

“No.”

“What happened?”

“I ate it.”

We all nodded. That seemed perfectly reasonable. After a minute I asked, “Hattie, you ever get your bowls back?”

“Sometimes.”

“How?”

She smiled. “I write my name on the bottom.”

Curtis grinned. “That works?”

“No.”

“But whoever’s got it knows they’re keepin’ stolen property.” The whole Coffee Cup erupted. Even Earl laughed.

Outside, somebody drove by in Jimmy Harlan’s shiny blue pickup. Everybody waved. Jimmy waved back. Funny how little towns work.

Your casserole might come home in the wrong bowl. Your cake plate might disappear for six months. And every now and then, somebody will hand you a container and say, “I think this belongs to you.”

It usually doesn’t. But you’ll take it anyway. Because next Sunday, somebody else is liable to need it.

And somehow, by the time it gets there It’ll feel like home.