The Pies On The Station Steps

Twenty-six years of Sundays

That is how it went, week after week, year after year, longer than I ever thought I would keep anything going.

Apple was the standby. We had four old trees behind the house that Walt’s father planted, and in a good fall I would put up enough to carry me most of the year.

Cherry from the jars I canned every July, sour cherries from the tree by the clothesline, the kind that make your mouth pucker and beg for more at the same time.

Pumpkin in October from the patch by the barn. Pecan at Christmas, with the real cane syrup I bought once a year from a man at the farmers market who tapped his own.

I learned which crusts traveled best on a cold morning and which ones went soggy. I learned to cut the steam vents in a cross, because Walt said it looked like a little blessing baked right in, and I liked that.

I kept the tins separate from my own kitchen tins. I had a stack of eight of them that just lived for this. I scratched our initials into the bottom of each one with a nail, a W and an E close together, so if one ever got mixed into my cupboard I would know to send it back to its job.

The notes were the best part, when they came. Never signed either, same as me, so we were two anonymous people writing back and forth across a quarter of a century.

“The cherry beat the apple this week, but do not tell the apple.” “We had a rough one last night and this helped.” “New guy says this is better than his grandmother’s and we told him to keep that opinion to himself.” Little things, written on the backs of call sheets in pencil, that I saved in a shoebox I still have.

One February the roads iced over so bad I could not get the Buick down my own lane for nine days. The Sunday I finally made it in, there was a note already waiting, taped to the station door, that just said, “We were worried about you. Glad you are okay.” They did not know my name or my face, and they were worried about me. I drove home and cried the good kind of cry.

Twenty-six years. If you do the arithmetic that is more than thirteen hundred Sundays, and better than two thousand six hundred pies, give or take the weeks I was sick or snowed in.

I never counted it up at the time. You do not count a thing you do for love. You just do the next one.

The tins always came back, rinsed, stacked by my mailbox, sometimes with a scrawled note and sometimes not. That was the whole conversation we had, that firehouse and me, for a quarter of a century. Empty tins and full ones, trading places in the dark.