… wanting to bake a pie

Yesterday as I walked through the living room, I passed the bowl of apples on the small round side table next to my chair. I caught the scent of the apples, Granny Smiths and Lady Pinks, which sometimes happens, and looking back at them, after a quick mental check of my day without a schedule, I thought, “I could make a pie today.” I have loved to make pies, but in these years of life, the thought rarely comes to me unless I actually want to make one or a family event is on the day’s calendar. I have other things to do, and those other things keep taking longer to do than they used to. In fact, they take longer than they did when I first started saying that they take longer than they used to. My friends and I comment from time to time on how long it takes to do what are some of the routine tasks required of everyday life. “Where did the day go?” We wonder to each other in our e-mails back and forth. In fact, the only thing that doesn’t take longer than it used to is time itself, which is speeding by.

When I was a young mother, I knew where the days went: getting my children up and ready for school, getting myself ready for work, working, picking up and delivering children to activities and picking them up again, getting home, checking on homework, making dinner, cleaning up, checking on baths and clothes laid out for the next day, doing a load of laundry, sometimes starting a dinner to have ready to put together for the next evening meal, showering, getting my own clothes laid out for the next day, and falling into bed. Not one thing out of the ordinary but filled with blessings that I sometimes recognized and more often did not. The blessings of a life, breathing in and breathing out, as my children also lived their sweet lives, breathing in and breathing out. Such precious moments, some of which I saw and felt, some of which slipped by in a tired blur.

I had a neighbor back then who was also my friend. She lived at the end of the cul-de-sac and as years went by, we got together in the various ways that fit our lives and schedules. Her two sons were slightly older than my son and daughter. Although we’ve lived in different cities for longer than we were neighbors, and we are rarely in touch, she always remembers my birthday with a card. Our birthdays are close together. I, on the other hand, forget about that until I get her card and appreciate the blessing of her remembering. This year in the card she sent, she told me that her husband has Alzheimer’s with an added twist of something called Lewy bodies that adds motor issues and hallucinations and delusions to Alzheimer’s already painful list of characteristics. The news was heartbreaking to me.

Yesterday I called my friend. We talked for a long time, catching up on children and grandchildren and how we are dealing with aging in general, and what is happening with her husband in particular. The phone call was sweet and dear, and I recognized the preciousness of it. I also talked for a few minutes with her husband. He said he has good days and bad days. He was wondering about reading a book about what to expect next for himself, but he was being advised against it. He also told me that he had a memory from the days that we were neighbors when he was out for his morning run past our house, and I was out working in the yard. He stopped to talk with me and remembered that moment as a nice one in his routine. I remembered, too. I was planting miniature gardenia bushes, and as he was running by, I paused to say hello. He paused, too, and we spoke only briefly, as neighbors do. About the lovely morning? Something from the church both of our families attended? I don’t know. Nothing out of the ordinary and part of the preciousness of life that we both noted and remembered.

I never did make that pie yesterday. The day ran out and with it my extra energy. I did roast a chicken and smelled it in the house for the three hours it was in the oven and afterwards. I had planned to make a soup with it, and then because it was such a luscious chicken, I thought I would use it for one meal first and make soup another day. By evening when it was time to cook the fresh beets I had bought and decide on one more side for the meal that all seemed like more work than soup. So I put chicken broth in the pot, cut up the butternut squash I had roasted the night before, and added fresh spinach that I chopped up along with chunks of tomato and green onions and seasonings. I did pay attention to the precious moments of this process, not as precious as my children were in the years of homework and baths, but precious still in this season of life, precious in the colors of the food and the process of chopping and cooking what will be tasty and healthy for my husband and me keeping our bodies’ life moving for this present day now, which is what we do have, the blessing of breathing in and breathing out.

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