The Flour Sifter They Left Me

The stand at the Saturday market

Come spring, I rented a folding table.

There is a farmers market that sets up every Saturday morning from May to October in the parking lot of the old feed store, and it is a modest thing, a dozen tables, tomatoes and sweet corn and jam and a man who sells honey and a Mennonite family who sell the best sweet rolls in three counties. I had been going to that market as a customer my whole life. That first Saturday in May, I went as a seller.

I had spent two hundred dollars I did not have to spare on ingredients and a used chest freezer and a hand-lettered sign that said HARTLEY’S, just the one word, because that name still meant something in that town and I meant to make it mean something again. I brought pies. Sour cream raisin, and buttermilk, and a gooseberry that Della used to make in June, and a dozen dozen biscuits in wax-paper sleeves for a dollar apiece. And on the corner of the table, up on a little stand where everybody could see it, I set the sifter.

People asked about it. Of course they did. An old dented flour sifter on a table full of pies is a question waiting to be asked, and I had an answer ready. I would say, “That was my grandmother’s. Della Hartley. Every crust on this table went through that sifter.” And you would see it land on their faces, the older ones especially, the ones who remembered. The sifter did more selling than the sign did. People do not buy pie, not really. They buy the story of the pie. They buy the grandmother in the hot kitchen. They buy the thing they are afraid is disappearing from the world, and they are right to be afraid, because it is.

I sold out by nine thirty that first Saturday, and by nine the next. By June I had to start a list, with people pre-ordering pies for their church dinners and family reunions, and by July a woman drove down from Columbia for her father’s ninetieth birthday, and when she bit into it in the parking lot she called her mother on the phone and held it to her ear and said, “Mama, it tastes like Grandma’s.”

That was the summer I understood what I actually had. It was not a recipe. A recipe you can copy. What I had was the thing Della had spent fifteen years putting into my hands, the paying attention, the wrist, the cold fat, the feel of a dough one turn from ruin, the exact gold of a finished crust. You cannot leave that in a will. You cannot scratch that under a sifter. You can only give it to a person, slowly, over years, if the person keeps coming back. She had given it to me, and now I was giving it to a whole county, one pie at a time, and the whole time that dented tin sifter sat on the corner of my table catching the morning light, and I never told the family a word about it.