Her name is Irma.
Who is she? She is a wife, a sister, a believer, a saint, a baker of cheesecakes, a smiler, a laugher, and a mother, though she has no children.
When we first met Irma, she invited us to pull up a chair on her small porch, between the stray cats and Boaz, the flea-ridden cocker spaniel. Her electricity wasn’t working, so she had washed her clothes by hand with the help of a neighbor. We knew her only as “our Mexican host family”, and that we would be visiting with her for the duration of our stay. We had hopes of building, creating, fixing – but those were our hopes.
Though she doesn’t have indoor plumbing, her need is not to acquire it. Though her house is small and un-air-conditioned, her need is not to alleviate that. Though she and her husband Mauricio live on roughly $50 a week, her need is not to supplement that.
As we began to chat with her, we began to see her, not as poor or disadvantaged, but as a warm light of love that she wished to shower upon us. She didn’t need us. But she wanted us. She wanted to chat about anything and everything that our limited Spanish vocabulary would allow. She wanted to spend time praying about our families. She wanted to hear about our lives.
And so, last week, we bought ingredients to make a dessert. And we took them over and dropped them off to Mauricio who would keep them until Irma got back from visiting her family in the city. We stopped by a few days later and she cleared off the table and got out the ingredients. And then we did something that transcends language – we made a cheesecake.
She showed us how to crush the cookies, to mix them by hand with the butter to make the crust. She showed us how to mix the filling ingredients together and how to carefully pour the mixture into the pan. We were like kids on Christmas morning, a room of 7 people laughing as we took turns crushing cookies with a rolling pin (some of us more vigorously than others).
I don’t think any of us stopped smiling, even after we had started the journey home.
We came back the next morning to have a cheesecake breakfast feast. A little sliver of the cake had gone with Mauricio to work. I hope he could taste the joy and laughter that it contained. As we sat down at the kitchen table, I said a prayer, in Spanish and in English, expressing thanks for the harvest.
Our faces read contentment and satisfaction. And Irma beamed.
