The Apple Pie of Apple Pies

There’s your mother’s apple pie. Your grandmother’s apple pie. Apple pie from the corner café you remember as a kid. And then there’s the apple pie. The apple pie that is more than pie, that represents the institution of apple pie that we cling to as tradition, birthright, and the very foundation of the statement “motherhood and apple pie.”

I have been so fortunate as to have been given this pie of pies by a friend for my birthday.

The pie is known as apple cider pie. It’s delightful anyway you slice it, but best served warm, with a scoop of premium vanilla ice cream. No words I put down here can adequately describe the sublime perfume that gently rises from this dessert, truly fit for the gods themselves. I can imagine Saturn, god of the harvest, eyes closed in rapture, hunched over a slice like the one before me – a deep slice layered with apples, baked in earthenware, and arrayed with the fragrances of fall.

I can’t tell you what is in this masterpiece, but if it were possible to take a bite of late October,
not as you remember it as a child,
not as the best October you can remember,

but the October that you never thought could be possible,
the October you see in pictures by Norman Rockwell and Joseph Leyendecker,
the October imagined in poems by Robert Frost,
the October you wouldn’t have dared to dream, because the thought of something so painfully beautiful might make you cry – it’s that October.

Close your eyes and imagine a gentle sweetness that comes during the few seconds of light an autumn sunset casts on the glowing leaves of a sugar maple just before dusk, when the air is crisp and your heart is light -- imagine enjoying that for the time you can enjoy a slice of pie, and you’ll know what I’m enjoying here.

I don’t know what she put in it. It’s magic to me, and that’s a good enough explanation.

Eat yer hearts out. I ain’t sharin’.