The Life of Sprout Blanchard

 

When meeting someone new she would stick out her hand and say, “I’m Sprout Blanchard."

Her mother had named her Esperanza. Esperanza, after her great grandmother who’d fled Franco in January 1939 by walking across the Pyrenees from Barcelona.

Her father didn’t like the name. People in their small New England town sometimes had trouble pronouncing it. Was the last syllable spoken as th or za?

Sprout was a perfect nickname because she was small as a baby and stayed that way all her life, never growing beyond five feet. However her personality projected a much bigger person.

As a child, she wanted to control her life. If her mother put pajamas on her, she would climb into her crib refusing bedtime stories. Later as an adult she couldn’t explain why.

In first grade at St. Joseph’s when the nuns called her Esperanza, if she answered at all, it would be to say, “My name’s Sprout.”

Sprout’s mother met with the principal, an embattled nun that would have been great as the head of a penitentiary for violent offenders.

“Esperanza, Maria Esperanza of Jesus, has been beatified. We can’t forget that she founded the Handmaids of Merciful Love and the Sons of Merciful Love. It’s a wonderful name for your daughter,” the nun said in refusing to the use the name Sprout.

Sprout’s mother knew neither the nun’s information of Sprout’s namesake or the romanticism of her great grandmother Esperanza struggling for freedom by walking in blizzards over mountains to France would change her daughter’s mind, but she felt she had to try. Sprout’s father merely shook his head and let his wife try.

When the nuns continued to call Sprout Esperanza and Sprout continued to sit at her desk, her arms folded, refusing to answer, her parents enrolled her in a public school where she excelled at Math and Science and did exceptionally well in other subjects.

As a tenth birthday present, the parents went to court to change her name legally to Sprout.

Sprout didn’t have many friends, in fact she had none claiming the other girls silly. When Mary Lou moved next door and was in the same class they shared the same interests and became besties.

In 1981 Sprout’s mother produced her second child, a daughter. Sprout’s father said he would name “this one” because he wasn’t going through another rebellion. He checked the most popular names in 1980 and they were Jennifer, Amanda and Jessica. He asked Sprout what she thought and she said, “Amanda, but I really don’t care as long as it’s not Esperanza.”

The sisters were nothing alike. As adults Amanda worked for a fashion magazine while Sprout, now Dr. Sprout Blanchard, became an archeologist. Her interest in archeology had been stirred, when at 12 she found an Indian arrowhead in the woods behind their home.

She met her husband Paul Reilly when they shared a grant to excavate a Viking mini settlement in Northern New Hampshire. This opened the door to PBS interviews, magazine articles in professional journals and a tenure track position at the University of Washington’s Seattle campus.

Sprout’s parents were relieved that their different daughter had found her professional and marital comfort zones.

Paul, knowing the story of Sprout's first name, took her to see a university presentation of Romeo and Juliet.

When Juliet asks "What's in a name?" he squeezed  his wife's hand.

"Everything," she whispered.