November is apple pie month. In a year of fierce disagreements, this is a simple fact that is not up for debate. Plenty of people have told me that they don’t like apple pie, but it is just because they have never had the right one.
They picture a Marie Callender’s apple pie coming from the freezer section, going into the oven, and coming out… ordinary. Nothing against Mrs. Callender, I am sure she is a fine woman, but her apple pie comes up short and is only one of the examples that have caused Americans to move away from what was once the very epitome of what was great about this country.
“Oh no,” I have been corrected during debate, “my mom made homemade apple pie, and it still is not my favorite.”
Upon further investigation, “homemade” was a store-bought crust and a can of pie filling from the shelf at IGA.
“My mom,” I begin, “can make a pie.”
It is hard to even write about it without my salivary glands waking up and paying attention.
Pies in my parents’ house growing up started with my dad and I picking a truck load of apples. As fall drew near around late August or early September, he and I would climb in his full-size Chevy Blazer, connect the utility trailer my grandfather had built what seemed like to a young kid a hundred years ago, and pointed the nose of the truck toward Posen.
My dad was a UPS driver with his route taking him to the small agricultural town just outside of Alpena. He easily made friends with his customers, one of whom offered the apples from the trees lining his cow pastures. The cows would push through the fence to get the apples that fell in the ditch, and the farmer was happy to have them gone.
My dad and I would work our way down the fence line, tasting apples from the trees as we went, determining which ones would go in pies, which would become sauce, which would get eaten fresh, and which ones the deer would get in the feed piles near our hunting blinds.
They were all wild apples from trees that had sprung up of their own accord and were left to fend for themselves. And, they produced some of the best tasting apples that so many of my childhood memories are made of.
“This one’s a good one,” Dad would squint one eye as he bit into an apple tart enough to make his whole face pucker up.
He would hand me a sample, I’d agree, and those apples would get set aside for pies.
At home, in the evening after work, my dad would go out to where the apples were piled by our shed, grab five gallons worth of pie apples in an old bucket, bring them into the house, head down to the basement, turn on the news, and begin to peel.
My mom would always act surprised when he would return up the stairs after the news with a bucket of peeled and cored apples.
“Oh, my,” she would exclaim in the same way about every time, “what am I supposed to do with all these?”
He would look at me out of the corner of his eye and say something like, “Well Mom, we haven’t had a pie in a while now.”
Time is a relative thing, but “a while” in reference to pie in my childhood home in the fall referred to approximately two days.
“Well,” she would sigh, “I guess I’m due to make a pie.”
Evidently “a pie” is a collective term for six pies, because when she was done, there would generally be a half-dozen put together, crusts from scratch, filling from real ingredients, some for the freezer and a couple for eating right away.
My Dad would drop a pie off at Chuck Allison’s place about once a week. He was a good family friend and was like an uncle to me. He was also a special challenge for my mom.
“All right Chuck,” she would say as he handed her the empty pie plate at church, “how was this one?”
“Well Nan,” he would him and haw a little, “not going to lie to you. It was a pretty good pie.”
Mom would smile knowing Chuck had not completed his review yet.
“But,” he would continue, “it could’ve used a little more cinnamon, and if you send another my way, I’ll gladly try it for you again and let you know if you get it right.”
Mom would laugh, shake her head, and walk away with the empty pan. Chuck would look at me, push out his dentures and wink. He knew he’d be getting another pie next week.
Traditions changed a little when I left for my first year of college. I missed gathering apples, but more tragically, I wasn’t there when the hot pie came from the oven.
At the dining hall, I bit into a piece of apple pie, tasted it and let my fork fall to my plate.
“What’s wrong?” my roommate asked.
“Well, it isn’t exactly home cooking,” I complained.
“The food here is just as good as what my mom makes,” he replied.
I silently mourned for this poor guy’s childhood.
Mom found a way though.
“You think it will ship?” she asked my dad as she held up a freshly baked pie.
He took it from her, shrugged his shoulders, found a box and started a forty-five-minute process of armor plating that pie to improve its survival chances. When he was all done, he stood in front of my mom with the box at chest height, turned it upside down, and dropped it to the floor. He picked it up, opened the box and pulled the perfectly unscathed apple pie from inside.
“It’ll make it.”
My roommates and I were on a first name basis with the UPS guy. He’d come in with a box we knew held pie, sit down, and drink a bottle of coke that we offered him. When he would head back out, the guys in the dorm room would celebrate pie day.
“What’s pie day?” Bob, a new initiate to the celebration naively asked.
“Well, you see,” my roommate started, “Jason’s mom bakes a pie and ships it to us about once a week. When it gets here, we eat it.”
Bob looked on not completely understanding the sheer look of excitement in my roommate’s eyes as he did a Wile E. Coyote dance across the room looking for the knife. It was, after all, just a pie.
“Well, I guess I’ll try a slice,” he shrugged.
We opened up the pie, I looked down holding the knife, and asked the logical question, “How do you cut a pie into thirds?”
“What?” Bob asked incredulously, but he had found a new understanding as we all laid around the room enjoying the euphoria that came from eating a third of my mom’s apple pie.
From then on, Bob just kind of knew when the UPS truck would show up.
Tradition changed once again upon my accepting a job in Alaska. I hugged my mom and assured her it was only for three years and that I would move back to Michigan to teach after scratching the adventure itch. Inadvertently, I moved out of pie range. Though my dad was sure he could armor plate a pie to survive even the beating USPS and the village airlines would put it through, my mom was not convinced it would not spoil in transit.
They began armor plating apples and sending up two boxes of a bushel a piece. Kids in Savoonga began finding out that there were more than the two varieties they knew: red and green.
“I don’t like red apples,” a student exclaimed as I handed him one to try.
“That’s because you have only had Red Delicious your whole life,” I said as he took the Mac I was offering.
“Wow, this is good,” he said as his eyes opened literally and figuratively.
And, I began making my own pies.
“Jody,” I called my sister, “do you have Mom’s pie recipe?”
“Uh,” she responded, “I don’t need it. I just drive over to her house.”
Mom sent me a box with all of the necessary recipes for adult life shortly thereafter. I think she has tried to give them unsuccessfully to my sister too.
As I made my first pie, I read the note next to the teaspoon of cinnamon, “I use more.” I couldn’t help but think of Chuck as I turned the cinnamon container over and began beating the bottom.
Shortly after making that first pie, I met the woman who would become my wife, and it kind of put a little kink in my three year plan. Mom and Dad celebrated with us at the wedding, and then continued sending two bushels of apples each fall. We adopted a daughter who quickly earned the nickname “Two-a-Day Romay,” because, unchecked, she could eat a half-dozen apples on her own in a couple hours.
Myra and I took apple pies to family gatherings.
“You guys are in charge of the pies from now on,” my nephew mumbled through a mouthful of his second piece.
In a year when we can’t travel to see family back east and the tie to home is blatantly more important, my younger daughter squealed as I carried a box up the porch stairs, “Oh, that one smells wonderful… its apples. Open it Dad, open it,” she encouraged as I put it down.
Besides needing the same limit we put on her sister, Ellen has also taken up her mom’s habit of sneaking an apple out of a freshly baked pie. I pretend to be upset, but all that does is encourage the both of them to continue their bad behavior.
This year marks my twentieth in Alaska, and people continue to ask if I miss Michigan and if I ever think about moving back. I have gotten slower to answer. My mind drifts to the sun rising over Lake Huron, the red and orange painted across the hills of hardwood in autumn, the feeling of the first dip of the year in the lake, the smell of fallen leaves during bird season, the sound of a summer breeze kicking through the aspen, and the taste is always apples.
But, this is where God has me now, and I am happy in that.
