The Forty Pies My Daughter Baked

The two days our kitchen smelled like heaven

We drove out to the orchard stand on the county line and bought apples by the bushel until the back of my old Buick sat low. We cleaned out the flour and sugar at the Ardell grocery, and Mr. Delp who owns it, when Josie told him what the pies were for, quietly knocked a third off the total and told me to hush when I tried to argue.

Then we baked.

Lord, did we bake. Our little kitchen turned into a factory and a disaster at the same time. There was flour on every surface and cinnamon hanging in the air so thick you could taste it breathing, and apple peels curling in the sink, and both of us with dough dried on our forearms. We only had the one oven, so it took us the better part of two days, four pies at a time, all through Saturday and into Sunday. Josie ran the whole operation. She had a system, peeling station and rolling station and a row of pie tins lined up like soldiers, and she worked with her tongue between her teeth and flour in her hair like the fate of the world hung on getting the lattice right.

I have a picture of her from the middle of it. She is standing at the table with forty pies cooling in rows behind her, golden and steaming, and she has got flour up to her elbows and across one freckled cheek, and she is grinning at me like she just pulled off a bank job. It is my favorite picture that has ever been taken. You will understand why in a minute.

By Sunday afternoon we had forty two apple pies loaded into every box and cooler and laundry basket we owned, stacked so careful in that Buick that I drove ten miles an hour the whole way to town.