Pie!

A change in the weather: I ran out before the thunderstorms moved through Friday night, gathering armloads of daffodils and hyacinths and forsythia, bringing them inside, trying to save them before the storms.

Then Saturday arrived overcast and rainy. Surrounded by colorful blooms amid the gloomy day outside: a perfect morning for making apple pie!

I do not always feel joyful when setting out to make a pie. I do not say to myself: I will love this! But then, when I am making it, I enter a sort of Zen-like state. My hands working, I become one with the pie.

I am peeling the apples, cutting them up small, covering them with the sugar and the cinnamon, mixing and rolling the dough, covering the pie pan, dumping in the good gooey stuff, carefully weaving the lattice top, tucking in bits of butter and brown sugar along the top, tamping the edges of the crust down with a fork, and then baking it, the house filling up with good smells.

While my hands are working, my mind is visiting the past, and some of the ones I have loved best.

I think of my mother's kitchen, crowded and full of light, and bustling with talk and laughter; the very heart of our home. If you are a visitor, we entertain you in the living room; if you are family, we sit in the kitchen, where the real business of family living is conducted.

I think of my Aunt Ella Mae, baker and jelly maker extraordinaire, and how much she loves my father. I picture my father's face: gleeful, like a little boy who's won the lottery, when she spoils him with her baked treats.

I remember my Grammy Carvell's kitchen, full of good smells and stories and games and children. And I think of my grandmother, stylish and lovely and good-smelling, in her floral dresses and matching peep-toe shoes. In my memory, she is laughing, in fact, wiping her eyes of tears from too much laughter. You just know she has some of that famous homemade strawberry ice cream in her freezer, the ice cream a creamy white with just a hint of pale pink, and filled with big chunks of luscious, red berries.

Oh, a house smelling of pie is a house full of love; a house full of memories of the sweetest of times . . .