The wind was blowing, the leaves were falling, and I had just read a post about using a fan to boost the interest factor when taking pictures. So I grabbed my youngest daughter. “Hey, I’ll give you a piece of candy if you come outside and let me take pictures of you,” I said. She jumped at the chance to earn a piece of yucky hard candy and hurried to throw on my Guatemalan poncho.

Then she just sat there while I took pictures to my heart’s content.

Why did I not think of bribery before?

We’d hear the breeze roaring through the trees down across the road, and I’d ready my camera.

She’d lift her chin and face the wind.

And then she’d start to smile.

“Feel the wind!” I yelled, and she grinned harder.

“Come on. Smile bigger! Show me your teeth!” And so I got this:

Serves me right.

This little girl is a work of art, let me tell you. She goes through spells where she’s highly irritable, spitting venom with every breath, defiant and argumentative. After one particularly bad day, or series of days, rather, I said to her, “You’ve been having a hard time lately, haven’t you?”

She nodded sullenly, and I said, “What should we do when you get like that? Do you need to go outside and play? Snuggle with me? Be alone in your room? What helps, huh?”

“Listening to music,” she said, quick as a wink.

And it’s true, the girl loves music. She will listen to tapes for hours on end. She picks out melodies on the piano. She loves the songs from My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music. Music feeds and soothes her.

I’ve started giving her piano lessons, but I think she needs more. I think she needs to sing. Perhaps I should look into getting her into a choir? I’ll have to ponder this more.

I also need to ponder why it is that at our all saints’ day church service, she lit a candle, not for her dear friend’s deceased father or her great grandmother, but for Sally, her big sister’s dead guinea pig. It added an element of hilarity to an otherwise somber service.

And I need to ponder how it is she managed to get such gorgeous golden ringlets. The girl has no idea how lucky she is. And the curls will probably all disappear with puberty, or, if not puberty, then with childbirth. My hair used to be stick-straight, but then I had kids. Same things with my complexion: it used to be creamy smooth…until I had kids. Having kids has changed me from the inside out.

It’s been totally worth it.

When my older daughter caught on that her sister was posing for candy, she demanded her turn.

Or maybe I asked her, I forget which. In either case, she was eager to oblige.

Candy is a tool that must not be underestimated!

This girl will be a teenager all too soon. When my husband saw this picture (a pose she pulled off all on her own), he actually gasped, “Teenager! She looks like a teenager!”

She’s starting the bursting-into-tears-at-the-drop-of-a-hat thing. (Door slamming was already commonplace.) She likes to attach an old portable phone to her jeans, put on the headphone/mouthpiece thingy, and sashay around the house talking valley girlese. It drives her father batty. In fact, just the other night he roared, “Don’t talk like that! I can’t stand it! It makes you sound … dumb!”

He’s never one to mince words (he once mentioned that a soup we were eating at a friends’ house tasted “moldy”—he has yet to live that one down), but his outburst didn’t slow our girl down, oh no. She just went up to him and yakked louder.

Seriously, this girl doesn’t stop talking. Her mouth goes and goes and goesandgoesandgoes. At least a half dozen times each day I find myself squeezing my eyes shut and screeching, “Do not say another word!”

“But—,” she presses.

“Stop it!”

“But—”

“DO! NOT! SPEAK!”

Such theatrics buy me approximately 8.5 seconds of silence. It’s a losing battle.

See how her chin is lifted here? It’s how she goes through life, kind of rammy. She’s a lot like her father. He gets her. Which is good, because, well, lets just say, I love her to smithereens, and I respect her and adore her and think she’s the bomb, but I don’t get her.

This is what’s so amazing and unique and strange about raising children. They are people. I mean, duh, right? But no, really! These children, these people who came from me, exhibit behaviors and thinking patterns and tendencies that are so completely not me. It’s fascinating, challenging, intriguing, invigorating, and baffling.

Partway through the wind and her brother throwing rakefulls of leaves on her, my girl, ever the resourceful one, plucked a long green grass and tied her hair back.

And then when I told her to kneel, because I wanted to shoot some from-above pictures, she went all devout on me.

I never even got around to playing with the settings on my camera. But after last night’s traipse around town, I have enough candy to fuel a gazillion photo shoots, so I’m not worried.

This same time, years previous: why I’m spacey, Greek yogurt, oatmeal bread

“What’s wrong with Stayman?” my husband asked over the phone. There was a fruit stand close to where he was working and he had stopped by to pick up some apples for me.

“There’s nothing wrong with them,” I said, “but according to my notes, we like York best for storing and Fuji for eating.”

“Okay, I’ll get some,” he said, and hung up. I didn’t hear back from him, so several hours later I gave him a ring.

“Did you get the apples?” I asked.

“Let’s not talk about it,” he mumbled.

“What do you mean? Didn’t they have any?”

“They had them.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

He exhaled heavily. “Let’s just say we’re never going back there again.”

“Um, hon?” I said, finally catching on, “how much did the apples cost?”

A brief silence, and then, “Twenty-five dollars.”

“Twenty-five dollars a bushel?” I yelped. “And you bought them? You dingbat!”

And then our barely-limping conversation tumbled rapidly downhill. Ugly, it was. When he came home and parked the two boxes of apples on the picnic table, tempers flared all over again. But he’d agreed to pay the 14 dollars—the difference in the cost between apples from my favorite local orchard and this overpriced stand—out of his personal money, so I shut up.

The following morning I lugged the apples down to the cellar and transferred the Yorks into one of our bushel crates—I needed the cardboard box to store my newspaper-wrapped sweet potatoes—and was dismayed to discover that the apples only filled the bushel three-quarters of the way full. Bushel containers are different sizes and there’s a chance ours was larger, but my favorite orchard gives us bushels that fill our crates, and for much less money, too, humph. The steam started to puff out my ears all over again. 

And then I noticed the apples were bruised. Squishy spots everywhere! So much for long-term storage.

I stomped upstairs and called my husband. “I’m taking them back,” I hotly announced.

He sighed, “Is it really worth it to drive all the way back just to save a few dollars?”

“Yes, it is. This place is ripping their customers off and I will not stand for it.”

The woman who answered the phone quickly handed me off to her superior.

“Yes, this is Loreen. May I help you?”

“Yes, my husband bought some apples from you yesterday, and I’d like to return them, please.”

“Can you tell me what’s wrong with them?”

“Well, yes. They’re overpriced, which is our problem, I know. But also, the bushels aren’t filled the whole way, and the apples are bruised.”

“Our apples are good quality,” she said defensively, “and it’s not our fault that they cost more than other places. That was your choice.”

“Yes, I know,” I said, immediately regretting I mentioned the price. “But we got the apples for long-term storage and they won’t last, bruised as they are.”

She then attempted to convince me—via a detailed explanation of their grading system—that the motley, not-full bushel of bruised apples was the best out there.

“So can I bring them back tomorrow?” I said.

She took my name and number and said she’d get back to me later on that evening.

“Maybe they’re dirt poor, barely hanging on by a thread,” my mother said. “Maybe your fifty dollars is what’s saved them.”

“Whatever, Mom,” I snapped.

Loreen still hadn’t called back by the time I had to leave for my evening church meeting, so I coached my husband on what to say if she should happen to call. “Her name is Loreen,” I said, not wanting him to be caught off-guard and accidentally give up the apple battle.

A brilliant idea hit me as soon as I slipped into the driver’s seat, and I was dialing my home number before I was even out of the driveway. My husband (bless his overpriced apple-buying heart) answered.

“Hello, this is Loreen from the orchard!” I blared in a southern, hickville accent (which is quite different from Loreen’s real voice, but he didn’t know that now, did he?) “There is no way in hell (except I pronounced it ha-a-ill) we is going to take back them apples!”

Silence, and then a shocked, “Excuse me?”

“I SA-A-ID,” I hollered, barely able to keep my voice steady, the giggles bubbling up from my belly like hilarious little hiccups, “THERE IS NO WAY IN HA-A-ILL WE IS GOING TO TAKE BACK THEM APPLES!”

“Um… okay…”

“Honey, it’s me!” I screamed, bouncing up and down in my seat and laughing so hard I could hardly see the road. “I love you so much! Hahahaha, heeheeheehee! Did I get you?”

“Wha—? Oh, man, that was rude. That was so rude. That was so rude!”

I called the fruit stand the next morning. (“She’s not going to call you back,” my husband had correctly forecasted.)

I cut straight to the chase. “Can I return the apples this morning?”

“The owner is out of town until Monday and I’m pretty sure he’ll say you can’t return them,” Loreen said, her voice hard. “Your dissatisfaction with the price is not our problem—”

“No, the apples are bruised,” I said slowly, clearly, my voice equally steely.

“Well, your husband had every opportunity to open the box and look at them.”

“Sooo,” my speech slowed to a crawl, “you are not concerned with customer satisfaction?”

“Um, yes, but…” her voice trailed off.

“Are you really saying you won’t let me return them?”

“No.”

“Okay. Well, thank you. This is really interesting and helpful for me to know, especially in how I relate to others in the valley.” Which is my pathetic version of a veiled threat.

Only later did I realize what I should’ve said. I should’ve said, “Well, Loreen, this has all made a very interesting story. Are you sure this is the ending you want?”

Dear Bowman’s Orchard,

You broke my heart, my consumer confidence, and my bank account. We’re through.

Love,
An Apple Lover

At least I got to be Loreen for a little. That was fun.

This same time, years previous: dusting the dough, light-as-air hamburger buns and sloppy joes, how to freeze pumpkin

In a temper fit this past summer I got hoisted by my own petard.

I wanted hamburgers that evening, cooked on our dinky grill, over a scrap-wood fire instead of storebought charcoal, but my husband and I weren’t smart enough and procrastinated grilling till the heat had started to dissipate. The burgers huddled above the smoke, weakly oozing, rotting. Disgusted at our ineptness—we always seem to bungle meat, even using charcoal—I snatched up the small rusty grate, stomped into the house, and tried to shove it into the kitchen range’s gas broiler (if I’m remembering right). Naw, bad idea. Instead I transferred the patties to a cookie sheet and rammed that in, fuming and muttering.

Days afterward, setting out to bake, I discovered the oven wasn’t heating up. No fire shot out of the element holes, though I seemed to hear the rush of gas. Only later did I catch on. I’d broken my own stove—a tiny gizmo next to the broiler’s pilot light.

My quandary wasn’t unlike that of some years ago near Christmas when the oven knob on the range we owned at the time, a prized, elderly gas/wood cookstove, suddenly gushed flames. I had cheese sandwiches toasting in the skillet. It would be a few weeks till the defective part could be replaced. No oven over the holidays, uh-oh. The crisis reduced us to buying Walmart donuts. Making a birthday cake for me, our 18-year-old carried his batter in pans down the road to the neighbors’ to bake.

But this stove? I wasn’t sure the model now in our possession was worth fixing. It’s the ordinary type—my husband scavenged it from an abandoned, weather-soaked house, paying $15, and although Mr. Handsome Son-in-Law must have thought us insane, he voluntarily took the thing apart, scattering the metal tubes and little jiggy screws across our driveway, scraping off the crud, and then reassembling. But all these years later, the stove’s flabby oven gasket? The oven walls’ evaporated insulation? Why bother with repairs?

I vacillated and vacillated. It’s been months now, and our junker is still all I’ve got. I figure we’ll hit upon another bargain or else I’ll pick out something spanking brand-new. In the meantime I’m resorting to my large cast-aluminum cookpot, pocked in the bottom, with a bucket-type handle and a soaring lid with an eroded black knob, that once belonged to Grandma Kurtz. I’ve inserted a flat cooking rack from another kettle.

This stovetop baking is a mildly tricky operation. No thermostat. And if I preheat the pot I must prop two hot pads inside, against the sides, so I can lower the pie down in without charring my knuckles. Also, any bubbling over results in coal deposits impossible to scrub loose (a jackhammer might work). But, oh my, an apple pie, say, can turn out dazzling. A week or so after the first, I managed three such fruit tarts, causing our whole family who’d collected for the weekend to hiss in surprise and adulation.

I can roast potatoes in the pot. Squash works, too. No plans for a groundhog quiche like our Pittsburgh son’s, but I have other ideas languishing up my sleeve. Give me time. The pleasure, I think, comes from the warring—the dueling—no, the permission I’m granted to flaunt my contradicting impulses: my frugality as well as my wastrel inclinations. I’m infatuated with the possibilities—the notion of depending upon a stingy blue fringe of burner flame, not hedonistic gusts of oven gas, to procure the most succulent and carnal of temptations.

I don’t expect I’ll get to Jennifer Jo’s pie party. We live 90 miles across the mountains. Besides, a God’s blood pie—what I’d want to bring, like the pies in a long drawn-out story I’ve written, pies as richly grape-y as any communion-cup sip—deserves a perfect crumb topping and I’ve not experimented enough, yet. I’m not positive the pie’s topping crumbs would achieve, in my big old pot, the desired crispiness. But reminiscent of the other dichotomy, that of a certain God-awful savory sacrifice, my consummate sacrificial offering would surely slay the crowd at Jennifer’s house. It’s a dubious, arresting thought.

Tips for Stovetop Baking

For open-face fruit pies, set the burner flame on medium(?) high(?)—just experiment. When your peeks assure you the pie is done, switch off the burner, keep the kettle lid off, and wait a bit to lift out the pie (for the sake of your knuckles).

For pumpkin pie, hold off on pouring the filling into the crust until you’ve put the pan into the kettle. Like with the fruit pies, let the edges of the crust get quite brown.

A two-crust pie might prove too daunting. Won’t the steam trapped in the kettle make the top crust gluey? Hm, give it a try.

You might accomplish a passable fruit cobbler—the kind with oatmeal crumbs. A cake-type cobbler? Dunno. And what about cookies, dropped onto a sheet of foil? Dunno. Lofty meringue pies? Help!!

Roast large or chunked vegetables by arranging a large piece of tin foil over the cooking rack and up the walls of the kettle and then layering the food inside. To avoid overbrowning, wedge small wads of crumpled foil against the kettle sides where they’re touching bare food or liner foil weighted with food.

How about “oven” fries—potato or sweet potato? And baked corn, in a glass dish? I wonder.