Bake at 350 Degrees For One Hour or Until Crust is Golden Brown

A foolish peacefulness filled our house that day.  My mother brought life to the kitchen, dousing my childhood in the nostalgic perfumes of cinnamon, vanilla, and cake flour.  Spilled powdered sugar dusted the linoleum floor like the kind of candy snow children dream about when sugarplums and Santa Claus are wrapped up in shiny paper under a pine tree.  Twangy guitar filled the rooms of our humble, country home.  Our hips swayed to the rhythm and we mimicked the slightly strained voice on the radio.  We sang “Here I am, stuck in the middle with you, “ our hands stuck in the middle of balls of fresh dough.

My mother, with her tattered, strawberry patterned apron, and arthritic hands only soothed by the repetitive process of knead, fold, knead, fold, was my childhood best friend.  I admired every obstacle she had over come in the shadowed days of her childhood when stealing a candy bar from the corner store might be the only chance at food for the night, to grow into the calm and nurturing mother I held so close.

            “You’re getting very good at that,” she said, watching me crimp the crust of my pie.  I smiled, folding the excess dough around the tip of my finger and spinning the pan in a counter-clockwise circle, creating scallops not quite as uniform as my mother’s.  I wanted my crust to be as beautiful and accomplished as my mother’s because I wanted to be as beautiful and accomplished as my mother.

            She had her arm halfway in the mouth of the oven, placing our pies on the racks to bake when I heard a loud thud like someone had just kicked our front door.

            “What was that?”

            We walked out to our front porch and saw a white van across the road in the church’s gravel parking lot.

            “Someone probably hit another deer,” my mother said and sighed, taking a few steps forward to get a closer look. 

I watched her head tilt with the curve of a question mark and suddenly her eyes widened.  Without a word, she ran, seeing the pile of metal scraps mangled beneath the nose of the van.  As always, I followed my mother’s actions, hurrying across the grass without knowing what I was running to.  A man in a motorcycle jacket was sprawled out atop the gravel.  He wasn’t wearing a helmet. 

My eyes took in what happened before my mind was able to process it.  An elderly man, wrinkled and weathered, stepped out of the van’s driver’s seat.  He walked over to my mother, whose hands were steadying the neck of the motorcycle man, searching for a pulse.  I stood a few feet away, motionless and staring.  Blood, the color of thick red velvet cake batter, had already begun to stain the pores of some of the gravel stones surrounding the motorcycle man’s head.  He still hadn’t moved.

I guess my mother had been trying to get my attention for a while, but I was too focused on watching the man’s face grow paler.  “ANESSA,” she tried again.  This time, I looked up.

“Go to the house and get an old blanket from the basement and bring me the cordless phone.”

I stared at her for a few seconds, silently begging her to answer my questions.  Like she always had.  She just stared back with pitiful eyes and I realized, for the first time my mother didn’t have the answers I needed.

“Be careful crossing the road,” she said, breaking the silence and gently trying to coax me into functioning once again.

I returned with the items requested and watched as my mother draped the thick, itchy afghan over the motorcycle man’s body.  The old man was crying beside his van. 

Still silent, I watched my mother call for an ambulance.  At eleven years old, I was still too much of a child to handle the accident, yet I had never seen my mother be so adult.  I saw her act out that compartmentalized strength she depended upon as a poor downtown city kid.  With stoic grace and empathizing eyes, my mother took on everyone’s burdens.  She called the authorities, soothed the man too worn to be driving that white van, and then she approached me.  Kneeling down beside me, she wiped a cool hand across my cheek.  I hadn’t noticed I’d been crying.

“Go back to the house and check on the pies.  Make sure they don’t burn.”  She offered me a soft smile.

When I opened the screeching wooden door to our kitchen, the smell of half-baked pecan pies embraced me.  As I stared at our candy snow covered floor I started to realize that my mother didn’t possess some County Fair award-winning recipe for elegant adulthood.  Instead, she’d made mistakes along the way – crumbling, unbinding dough because she forgot to cream the butter first; cakey, dry cookies because she added too much flour; wimpy meringue incapable of peaking because a bit of egg yoke slipped in.  My mother couldn’t give me all the answers, but she’d teach me how to turn brittle dough into a great crumble topping.  She’d teach me how to live with my mistakes, how to correct my wrongs.  And she’d show me that sometimes life hurts you even when it’s not your fault. Still, there are few things a fresh baked pie can’t soothe.

            Knead, fold, knead, fold, knead, fold.