Apple Peels and Holidays
My Mind's Eye Keeps an Album of Apple Photos
Sometimes just looking at an object, or the scent of it hanging in the air, or the taste of it on our tongue brings a feeling, an emotion, a memory that returns to us over and over again.
Apples, that ubiquitous, humble and common fruit of winter and fall, do that for me. Apple peelings and apple pie remind me of holidays, family fun, joy, laughter.
Wishing you all a wonderful and joyful holiday season!
Photo #1
It's a photo of two women, a mother and a daughter, one 69, one 49 standing in a tiny timeshare kitchen on Amelia Island, the Christmas eve when the dog ran under the table with a lobster tail in her mouth, and bit the granddaughter on the hand when she tried to retrieve it, the night before the Christmas the daughter and granddaughter spent in the ER while the granddaughter was treated for cellulitis and the daughter pleaded with the ER doctors not to quarantine a hungry but repentant beagle suffering with cancer.
The birth mother and her daughter look alike in the picture, each holding an apple peel and laughing, one peel four inches long, if we’re being generous, the other three feet long. The daughter triumphant. It was no contest, really. The mother blamed the peeler, but the daughter showed her that it wasn’t the peeler, or rather it was the peeler, but not the knife.
That daughter’s apple peel, slender, lovely, red and white, curling downward turned to the past, each curve a journey back to another kitchen, another holiday feat, all the way back to the first kitchen of the daughter’s memory, in her adoptive family’s house where the sound of dishes rattling in the sink, and clinking on the Formica table top still echo, where the placement of sink, stove and drawers remains sharply in focus: the secret spot under the breakfast nook table that was perfect for small hands to pry plaster off the walls unseen and uncover a treasure of Delft wallpaper beneath, or where the dachshund pawed opened the cupboard door one day and ate an entire lemon cake mix, his red brown fur powdery yellow, his eyes glazed with sugar, all the way back to the first apple peeling contests.
Photo #2/Mind’s Eye
My dad doesn’t remember now, but he used to like helping me in the kitchen. Really, only with one thing because my mother never let him in the kitchen, because he would make a mess – we all did – but even the kitchen general had to give way on special occasions.
At sixteen, I took over the task of making fruit pies for the holidays.
My mom could not “go to all that trouble,” preferring to make a bottom crust, roll it out quickly, toss it into the pie pan, prick the sides and bottom with a fork, pour in the pumpkin mixture, “be done with it,” as she said. She had no time for peeling and slicing apples, juicing oranges, grating lemons when she had a turkey to roast and giblets to cook for gravy. As a teenager, she had learned to cook for the farmhands on her parents’ farm in Oklahoma and there was no time to be fancy. (Insert note here that her quick jabs into the pastry dough, and the sucking sound that the Crisco made as she forced it with her fingers (not a pastry cutter) into the flour taught me the secret of a melt-in-the-mouth pie crust.)
But I did not want to eat pumpkin slime and I liked fancy.
It took a long time to peel eight apples for two mock mince pies. And this is where my dad came in. Two people, two peelers and two apples in a contest to see who could make the longest peeling made quick work and this would go on until we had a sink full of peelings and naked apples.
In those days, my dad always got the longest peel. He never lost. And those pies –apples, cranberry sauce, orange juice, lemon peel, raisins, cloves and cinnamon, all tucked into a homemade crust – were the best.
Photo #3
It’s a year after the Christmas of the dog bite, and I stand alone in a strange kitchen in Florence, a modern Ikea style plastic dining table with metal edges to my left, anachronistic in this five-hundred-year-old building with its ancient rough brick exposed as a decorative element from floor to ceiling.
I pick out a yellow apple from the bag of apples the market seller promised were the proper apples for a tart and take up the only knife in the apartment. My daughter skypes her boyfriend in the bedroom, not wanting to take part in the peeling tradition. The beagle with cancer is home in Florida, my father far away in California, covered up with a quilt in his recliner, his chihuahua standing guard on his lap. Ninety-one now, the last of his generation, his mind locked away in the empty corridors of Alzheimer’s. Too late, I wonder about the man locked out of the kitchen for 65 years. How did he get to be such a pro with the peeler? What competitions did he face as the eleventh child, how many holiday meals did he peel apples for? What joy and laughter curled up in those peeling rings?
The knife in this strange kitchen is not a peeler, and it’s a tough job, but carefully I make a thin ring around the apple in my left hand, turning the fruit between my thumb and hand, turning, turning. Yellow falls away, revealing white. The scent of apple fills the room.
I hold up the fruit, a perfect peel, the dress of the apple, dangles down.
I am sad, knowing this will only be a memory to me, a photo only in my mind, a tradition celebrated alone.
It’s one a.m. in the morning. The dried cranberries bought in the market have simmered in Vin Santo on the stove for three hours. I layer the homemade cranberry sauce over the sliced apples in the ceramic pie dish brought to Italy as a gift to my daughter wrapped in a towel in my luggage.
The marathon boyfriend skyping session ends. My daughter wanders into the kitchen. She sees me rolling out pie dough on the fake wooden high-top kitchen table using a wine bottle for a rolling pin and laughs. “What are you doing?” he asks. Pieces of discarded pie dough litter the tabletop.
“I’m trying to figure out how to make a lattice work on top of a pie, but I’ve never done it before,” I say in frustration. “I can’t get it right.”
“Want some help?” she asks. She sits down on the bar stool next to me, picks up a strip of dough and starts weaving slats across the fruit.
Janell Strube