Sam's Plates

This is week 62 of Raven’s wonderful word challenge. Please visit her here and read all the creative offerings!!

This Week's Ten Word Challenge is: gentle spring rain, mammoth, soap opera, worry, bubble gum, garden gate, seizure, of Biblical proportions, paralysis, wrinkles

Mini Challenge: operatic, stuffed animals, anger management, biographical, paint splatters

Samantha did not exhibit any of the classic signs of aging: wrinkles, sudden onset fascination with golf, wanton proliferation of elastic waist bands, creeping short term memory loss. No, our heroine was hobbled in infinitely less visible ways. Which made her all the more estranged from the mainstream, most of whom were just beginning their perennial thaw from a deep winter freeze.

As with many things in this life, Samantha had a contrarian response to the seasons. The advent of the first gentle spring rain would initiate an abrupt retreat from life. It was almost as if she was trading places with Persephone. She was plagued with vague worries and mammoth regrets which virtually paralyzed her. She had learned to bundle all of her vacation and sick days into an aggregate and submit a request for 3 weeks off during the month of April. Most everyone else was gunning for June, so she didn’t have much competition.

For the duration of her leave, Samantha would resign herself to protracted and fitful naps, mindless soap operas and a ritualistic survey of a musty collection of Bazooka bubble gum wrappers. This year, Samantha was determined to spin dross into gold.

She fashioned an atelier in the attic. The pitched sheet rock walls would be her canvas. She assembled all of the surviving stuffed animals: panda, Tigger, Piglet, Bert, Ernie, even her beloved Pooh bear. She then loaded the spray paint cans and set them around her like an arsenal. Once she passed through the proverbial garden gate, there was no turning back. Piglet swooned in anticipation of the frightful scene. Bert leaned in to Ernie as if to issue a salutary warning, “ I have a feeling we’re not on Sesame Street anymore, pal.” What ensued could only be described as an apoplectic seizure of biblical proportions. Samantha sucked in her breath, took aim and splattered her childhood friends with layers of pigment. This was an act of such unprecedented violence in her biographical schema that Samantha was convinced she was a prime candidate for anger management. Nevertheless, she persisted. This would give Eeyore something to mope about, she gloated.

Not long after her initial operatic outburst, Samantha began to apply her talents in a more focused manner. She engaged a longtime potter colleague in an unholy alliance. Will would forge the plates and she would paint them. Before long, legend spread of the dynamic and lively beauty of Sam’s paint splattered dinnerware. Featured in Martha Stewart’s Living magazine, they inevitably landed on Oprah’s table. The crowning moment occurred when a specially commissioned set of plates framed a hearty homegrown meal sourced from the White House lawn with Sasha and Malia beaming at the glistening romaine.