Wild for Wildflour: A Cupcake Review

Morning autumn sun gently graces the warm colors that now streak the trees along Hope Street. 

It’s around 9:30 in Providence, and I’m driving to meet a friend for coffee. A bakery I’ve never been to on a road I know all too well. Fall is in the air and crisp smells dance over the nose like a graceful ballet. The drop in temperature brings with it a gentle bite, but, in many ways – like a past romance not quite passed – the warm embrace of summer lingers still. Memories too, like the sweet autumn aromas they seem to permeate from every direction. Glacé reminders of family outings; excursions to pumpkin patches and mazes, far away harvest festivals and backyard leaf piles. Memories perfectly preserved by the season like a sweet jam: jarred and waiting only to be enjoyed at this exact time each and every year. 

I look through my rearview mirror while I prepare to make the left hand turn into Wildflour Bakery. Hope is a busy street, but it’s calm this morning. A five minute car ride through the tree lined boulevard is enough to look back on twenty five years of memories. 

I look back at a leaf-scattered street where precious abscissions of my childhood also seem to rest, scattered about. I look down at the golden, yellow, red tapestry woven from trees far older than me, and wonder if the trees spend as much time as I do fruitlessly sentimentalizing over their own jettisoned appendages. 

I look up and think about how these are somehow the same trees that stood over me while I held my moms hand and we crossed the road to Frog and Toad. Or a decade later while I parked to meet my friends at the fountain on the day I got my driver’s license. where just hours earlier my dad showed me how to get there. 

I look back to try and reconcile where the time went.

I look forward to seeing my friend and wonder where in time our conversation will go.

New memories with old friends. 

We talk the morning away in the corner of a cafe. About how so much has changed. About how things stay the same. Two kids in their prime laughing over old memories of good times. We talk about the white lies, and over what lies ahead. I think it’s the season; a nostalgic inferno, kindled by change but stoked by indulgent reminiscence. 

“I’m wild for Wildflour” I joke, as I bite into the Apple Caramel Cupcake, one such indulgence that Sarah convinced me to try. It’s everything I love about Fall. We both get another for the road before we part ways. I wonder about where we’ll both be a year from now, when the leaves are changing yet again, and how then, this will be an old memory with a new friend.