The Early Bird

Rodrigo Lopez opened his bakery in Ashby Falls, Vermont, in the first week of March, which the locals told him was the worst possible time to open anything. It was mud season. The snow was melting into brown slush, the back roads were all but impassable, and the town's eleven hundred residents seemed to spend most of the day indoors, waiting, as one of them put it, for the ground to make up its mind. Rodrigo, who had grown up in Oaxaca and learned to bake in his grandmother's kitchen, had never heard of mud season. He found out about it quickly.

Still, the regulars came. They came at six in the morning, when he unlocked the door, stamping their boots on the mat and talking, Rodrigo soon realized, almost entirely in proverbs. Walt Peabody, who had sold farm machinery for fifty years, bought a black coffee and a plain roll every morning and told Rodrigo, every morning, that the early bird catches the worm. Mrs. Dunbar, who ran the post office, warned him not to put all his eggs in one basket when he talked about opening a second shop. And when he suggested painting the front of the bakery bright pink, three different people told him, independently, that if it ain't broke, you don't fix it.

Rodrigo found this oddly comforting. In Oaxaca, his grandmother had spoken the same way. She had a refran for every occasion, and several for occasions that had not happened yet. When he overslept as a boy, she told him that God helps those who get up early, which was Walt's worm with better connections. When he complained, she reminded him that there is no bad thing that does not bring some good, and when he boasted, she warned him not to sell the bear's skin before he had hunted the bear. In Vermont, he discovered, nobody hunted bears in proverbs; they counted chickens instead, before they had hatched.

Half as a joke, he began to keep a list on the back of an order pad, pairing his grandmother's sayings with the ones he heard across the counter. Some matched almost perfectly. Others did not match at all. "The shrimp that falls asleep is carried away by the current," he told Walt one morning, and Walt thought about it for so long that his coffee went cold. "Huh," he said finally. "We'd just say you snooze, you lose." "That is the same thing," said Rodrigo. "Except with a shrimp." "Except with a shrimp," Walt agreed, and seemed pleased.

In April came the Maple Festival, the most important weekend of the town's year. There would be a parade, a pancake breakfast at the fire station, a sugar-on-snow stand and a baking contest that, people said with complete seriousness, had broken up at least two marriages. Rodrigo decided to enter. He would make conchas, the sweet, shell-patterned buns of his childhood, but with a topping made from maple sugar instead of ordinary sugar. He spent two weeks perfecting them. When he gave one to Mrs. Dunbar, she chewed in silence and then said, "Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating," and bought six.

Not everyone was convinced. The contest had been won for eleven years running by Walt's sister-in-law, Margaret, with a maple cream pie that the whole town regarded as a kind of public monument. "Nobody beats Margaret's pie," Walt warned him. "Don't go counting your chickens." That night Rodrigo called his grandmother. She was eighty-nine and the line to Oaxaca was poor, but her opinion arrived intact. "Tell your Walt," she said, "that the one who risks nothing wins nothing. And that nobody ever won anything by staying in bed." When Rodrigo passed this on the next morning, Walt nodded slowly. "Nothing ventured, nothing gained," he said. "Smart woman."

On the morning of the contest Rodrigo was up at three, which even Walt conceded was early for a bird. He baked four trays of conchas, carried them to the fire station through a fine spring drizzle and set them out on the long table beside Margaret's famous pie. Then, while the judges were still drinking their coffee, the power went out across half the town. The fire station kitchen went dark. The coffee urns went cold. The pancake breakfast, which depended on six electric griddles, was suddenly in serious trouble.

Rodrigo's ovens ran on gas. Within twenty minutes he had the bakery open again with both ovens roaring, and volunteers from the pancake breakfast were carrying bowls of batter down Main Street in the rain. Margaret herself appeared at his back door with a tray of pie crusts that needed baking. They worked side by side for three hours, not saying much, and fed most of the town. "Well," said Margaret, wiping her hands at the end of it, "every cloud has a silver lining." Rodrigo smiled and told her what his grandmother would have said: that there is no bad thing that does not bring some good.

Margaret won the contest anyway, and it seemed right that she should. But the judges invented a special prize that year for Best Neighbor, a small wooden plaque in the shape of a maple leaf, which still hangs above Rodrigo's counter. Next to it, in a frame, is the order pad with his list of proverbs, now three pages long. At the bottom, in Walt's handwriting, someone has added one more: "The early bird catches the worm. The early baker feeds the town."