“Excuse me, but would you like to buy some earrings?”
The voice was soft – a child’s – and I was nearly through the library’s sliding doors Thursday before I saw her, sitting in a chair near the exit.
She and her mother shared a table that displayed an assortment of colorful beaded earrings.
Back up. Double take.
Pardon me?
“Would you like to buy some earrings?” she repeated.
“I made them. I’m selling them to pay for my birthday party in August.”
Meet Vidalia York of Anderson, age 9 going on 10 – come August 9.
Vidalia, like the onion?
Slight eye roll. Deep inhale. Clearly not the first time she’s suffered this question.
Well, yes, like the onion, but also Vidalia like the flower, she says. At this Vidalia’s mother – Alecia York – explains that when her daughter – whom she now calls Vi, for short – was born, she named herVidalia, after a song. At the time Alecia wasn’t aware of Vidalia the onion.
Enough about the onion. Vidalia York was there to make a sale. I started with the obvious.
How much?
Four dollars.
Which pair do you recommend?
“Here, I think these black ones are cool,” Vi says as she holds them by their silver wires and dangles them before me. Her smile is wide. Her eyes lock onto her customer’s.
I’ll buy them.
The earrings were – are – cool. But also, Vidalia is an irresistibly enterprising kid. You’d have bought earrings from her, too. Long earrings or short earrings or red-and-orange ones, or light green and dark green ones, and the jiggly black-and-white ones I chose, as per Vi’s suggestions.
The chatty fourth-grader with an amber summer tan, shoulder-length brown hair and dark jade-colored eyes placed my purchase in a clear zip-top bag and chatted about how she’s an old hand at earning her own money. No big deal, really. She’s raked leaves for her grandpa, she’s done yard work, and once, Vi even sold her own bike so she could drum up some cash for something more crucial than a bicycle.
Vi’s most recent goal – her most ambitious financial endeavour thus far – is a Waterworks Park birthday party for eight guests, which costs about $120. The thing is, something that lavish would be a setback for her mom, who cleans houses for a living as the owner of York’s Clutter Control.
Mother and daughter hatched a plan to make and sell earrings because Vi likes to design and create jewelry. After an initial $30 investment in supplies the two got to work.
Vidalia shares these details brightly and matter-of-factly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a kid to take responsibility for funding her own birthday bash.
Maybe you’ve seen the mother-daughter sales duo around the north state at such places as the YMCA and Walmart and finally, the library, where, on the day we met, Vi was flying high because she’d made six sales in one afternoon.
“I think if I sell about three or four more pairs, we’ll be done,” Vi said.
To order a pair of Vidalia York original earrings, or for information about York’s Clutter Control, send an email to Alecia York at aleciayork@yahoo.com.
