Grateful

I made the first of two apple pies for Thanksgiving today, using my mother's recipe, and my apartment smells like nutmeg and warm apple. I've criticized my mother a lot over the years, but I always gave her credit for being the great cook that she was. She made a leg of lamb with garlic pressed under the skin that was to die for; a rolled stuffed round steak that was sublime. I have several of her recipes, for coq au vin or chicken cacciatore, but when I make them they never taste as good as I remember my mother's. As a child, in the manner of children, I was simply unaware of how excellent the food I was eating was; I came to understand that much later. I don't think she took any special enjoyment from cooking, but she was wonderful at it nonetheless.

She did not, however, bake, not even the tollest of Tollhouse cookies, except for that apple pie at Thanksgiving and, if the heavens were smiling that year, Christmas. My birthday cakes were usually Pepperidge Farm chocolate and I'm not complaining - I loved those square three-layered Pepperidge Farm cakes into my teens. There must have been the occasional bake sale obligation, but I have no specific memory of any; if so, I'm sure we solved the problem with Betty Crocker cupcakes. But that pie! Moist and sweet and brimming with apples covered with just the lightest crumble. I have eaten that pie every Thanksgiving of my life for as long as I can remember. That pie is Thanksgiving.

My apartment smells like apple pie tonight, warm and sweet, like Thanksgiving. I have much to be grateful for, there is the Small Boy after all. And there are days like today when I remember that it wasn’t all bad; my mother was human and complicated and deeply flawed and the bad outweighed the good, but there were those pies, those moments when our house smelled like nutmeg and warm apple. They were rare. But they were there. And I’m grateful for that.