Well, good morning y’all it was a long and rather uneventful weekend, here in the Texas hill country.
We spent most of Saturday with the rain looming and the muggy heat outside, just hidden away at home working on art projects and resting for the week ahead.
Sunday however was a little bit different, we decided to head into Wimberley to see my mom and stepdad. They had been to the Rio Grande Valley the previous week and had lots of goodies and surprises for the girls.
It’s a rather common site in Texas to see random roadside sellers selling their wares on the corners of busy intersections. Today as per norm there was a seller with what we love to call “yard yukkys”. These metal welded lawn decorations are pretty common in yards of homes and businesses in the hill country. With serious summer drought and heat as well as the pesky deer that love to eat anything planted in the ground, resorting to metal lawn decorations is usually our last option to keep a little pop of color in our yards.
I of course asked Peter to pull over and see at least how much this gentleman’s pieces were. I’ve been eyeballing several of the cactus for my front yard for some time but they were usually out of my price range. When I walked up I could see that his guy’s work was really good and he seemed really nice. Scattered around the normally empty dirt and weed-covered ground of this corner gas station were tons of his beautiful metal art. Bluebonnets, flamingos, cactus, and goats just to name a few. This guy had certainly been busy working hard to now have to sit in the Texas heat to try to sell just a few pieces. His table was layed out neatly with lots of smaller metal pieces and the one shinny piece that had caught my eye in the first place.
A 10” tall Copper Cactus!
I asked him how much they were and he gave me a very reasonable price. Of course, right next to it was another nopal cactus that I just had to ask about too. He grimaced a bit and named the same price as the first cactus. Having been in many negations with roadside vendors I knew this was his way of cutting me a deal or at least making it look that way. I smiled and said, ok so how much is this one really? He looked at me with a mischievous grin and said for you the same. I really never realized how much I missed the bartering and negotiating like this that I grew up within the Valley and when we would visit border towns like Progresso and Matamoros.
We got to talking and I mentioned to him that my company name was Copper Cactus and that his stunning replica of my company name had grabbed my attention. He had a very quizzical look in his eye and asked me with a look of seriouslness that you don’t usually see in the first encounter with someone. “Why did you name your company after a cactus?”
Ironically, this was a topic of conversation that Peter and I had just been having lately. A quick and easy answer to this is, that I love alliteration and it just made sense at the time. But that’s just boring no one wants to hear about that. I really do think that life gives you opportunities to share and reaffirm feelings and emotions that we wouldn’t be able to voice or put into words otherwise.
So when I answered him it came out a little something like this.
“Cactus’s are resilient! They prepare for the worst and can survive and thrive in the harshest of conditions. They are beautiful and they protect those who are in their circle, and just when you think that a cactus has been cut down, they come back bigger and strong and spread their beauty and protection further than before. That’s why I named my company after a cactus.”
I really do think that if I had tried to plan or write that outside of that moment it would never have been so elegant or meaningful. That’s what I mean when I say life gives us moments to clarify our world…this was my moment for Copper Cactus. To go a little further did you know that copper is supposed to symbolize luck? You know the old saying “find a penny, pick it up, all day long you’ll have good luck.” That comes from the ancient Greeks who thought that copper was a sign of luck.
So with a little bit of luck and a whole lot of hard work and preparation, I’ll be as resilient as a cactus so that I can weather any kind of harsh conditions. I can protect those that I love. And, even if I get cut down again I’ll come back better and strong than ever before.
After chatting with this vendor for a bit longer and sharing some laughs and our bond over being from the Rio Grande Valley we parted ways as I walked back to the car with both the copper cactus and the nopal cactus. I felt like a million bucks. Not only did I get two beautiful pieces to decorate my home, but I was also able to connect with the heart of my business in a way that I never could have in my own headspace.