The Apple Pie Defense

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Grief is a master of disguise. Like a vampire, it drains your self-respect until you’re openly sobbing in the grocery store because they’re out of spray butter. It masquerades as a hypnotist, fixing your gaze on one small patch of sofa for days. It is a ninja, ambushing as you walk into a room that used to feel less empty.

Sometimes, grief is a pastry chef.

Divorce and a string of family deaths had made it a hard year for me. Trying to recreate my Great-Grandmom’s apple pie recipe seemed a pro-active way to break my slide into depression. Every birthday and Christmas dinner of my childhood ended with Great-Grandmom’s apple pie, and these were all happy times, unless you were hoping for cake. If you wanted cake, you were out of luck until my brother’s birthday.

Grief had planted that seed in my head.

I realized that somewhere around pie number thirteen.

I had Great-Grandmom’s recipe folded and tucked in my recipe box. After years of cajoling, my Mom-Mom, her daughter-in-law, had finally gotten it out of the old lady. Great-Grandmom got soft and threw up the white flag in the form of an apple pie recipe.

Ha. Great-Grandmom’s kitchen was rimmed with an impressive salt and pepper shaker collection, filled with old cloth-calendars-turned-dish-towels, and covered by an asbestos tile floor, but you’d be hard pressed to find a white flag anywhere. When Mom-Mom danced off with the coveted recipe, Great-Grandmom smoothed out her house dress with her impossibly large German hands, sat down at her chrome-legged kitchen table, and laughed herself silly.

She might as well as given Mom-Mom directions for Shepherd’s Pie, for all that slip of paper had in common with the real apple pie recipe. Not long after, Great-Grandmom died, the real recipe locked beneath her steel gray curls.

Great-Grandmom: 1, Mom-Mom: 0. Game over.

I could taste their disdain for each other as I sampled my first attempt at the faux recipe. The filling had no magic; the crust, leaden.

The crust I could cure. My Nanny, my mother’s mother, had a perfect crust. Nanny had no animosity towards her own daughter, so that recipe I could trust.

Second attempt: crust, perfect; filling, terrible; no better than cafeteria pie.

Over the next week I made 16 pies, each time tweaking the ingredients to no avail. Rome apples, green apples, Gala apples. I had gotten very close with a combination of Gala and green apples, but still, the pie lacked something. Something that made it Great-Grandmom’s apple pie.

Grief had turned me into an obsessive-compulsive pie-baking lunatic.

Drinking in LIfe

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Grief Catches You...

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Stay wonderful

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Long over

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