On Love, Death and Apples

On Sunday morning, the phone rang while I was in bed beside the man I love, and my sister told me it had finally happened. Grandma had gone, finally separated from the fragile shell that weighted her to a hospital bed and a fog of pain.

We got up to find the day was extraordinarily bright and beautiful. A perfect Sunday. The English countryside was ebbing into harvest and a crisp autumnal chill, and we decided to walk off a hearty breakfast in the grounds of the manor house where we had stayed for the night. Hand in hand, we rambled through an overgrown forest behind the ornamental pond, talking about moving to Barcelona and having babies. Nettles nipped at my bare thighs, and gave David cause to prove that dock leaves rubbed on the pricked skin really do bring relief; a magnanimous quirk of nature. The football pitch we crossed, still foaming with thick green grass, had no takers and the croquet mallets stood at attention on the lawn, patiently waiting. We couldn't remember the rules but we whacked a few balls blithely through hoops anyway, in our own made-up game. He won.

Then, through an arch in a wall, we found ourselves in a secretive garden, tucked away beside the house. Generations of the denizens of the beautiful old house must have tended the ancient fruit trees, which still yielded an exuberant crop, but again no one took notice but the bees. The neglected trees wept fruit onto the ground and the air was thick with the perfume of ripening and rotting apples. Growing up in cities, I didn't often have the chance to pick the fruit I ate, but it still triggers an ancient excitement; surely every child rejoices in the first time the little hand closes around the jewel-like orb that yields to a tug and comes away, nestled in the palm, revealing itself to be either tart or sweet or, heaven forfend, worm-filled. My first apple-picking was at the crab apple tree in Grandma and Grandpa's back garden; a little suburban patch of green guarded by a white picket fence (although, in Calgary, I'm not sure what there was to guard against), where Grandma's clean sheets billowed and Grandpa's ranks of carrot tops marched in the breeze. Held aloft in Grandpa's arms, I grabbed a little russet apple and discovered that crab apples are a whole shocking world of sour for the mouth. I still see his face, wrinkled against the sourness as mine was.

But the apples that popped out all over the tree David and I had stumbled on were bigger than crab apples and promised to be sweeter. David reached up and tugged one off; his face exploded like a tree switched on at Christmas, confirming we'd hit the jackpot. Then, like men in the frenzied grip of a gold rush, we filled our hands and the crooks of our elbows until I took my jumper off, laid it on the grass and we piled the loot on that. There were Bramleys too, bigger and tart and singing of pies. Even more wonderful was the vine that rampaged all over one wall and dangled figs; huge, purple globules of sweet flesh. Those joined the pile on the jumper, and we carried off our treasure in the boot of the car.

At home, we realised how much fruit there was, as it piled up in bowls and colanders in the kitchen.   I found a recipe for apple pie on good old BBC Food, and started chopping and peeling and coring. In this new chapter I've suddenly plunged into, creating a home for David and I in our little Brightonian seafront flat, I resolve to be something approaching a decent cook. I (an all-burning, over-salting, smoke-alarm-activating disaster in the kitchen) come from a noble lineage of excellent cooks. How embarrassing. The women on the paternal side of my family could at least bake, and those who weren't gifted in the culinary arts could knock up a mean champagne cocktail and advise the staff on which soup to serve when. I can do none of these things, despite the best efforts of my mother, a superlative cook - who bought me the Osborne First Cookbook and valiantly attempted to steer my early efforts - and my maternal Grandma, who involved us in the Big Christmas Bake when we spent Yuletides in Canada.  Sadly, I have always been hopeless at this cooking thing...but its never too late to surprise yourself.

So, I am standing in a kitchen full of apples that are waiting to be marshalled into the perfect man-pleasing pie and attempting to summon the spirit of Grandma, who may even still be lingering in the atmosphere before the final ascent up to Heaven. It occurs to me, as I slice fruit and knead dough, that I wish Grandma had stayed longer. There's so much I realise I don't know, and now will never have the chance to learn from her. Its a moment of horrible finality, almost worse than the moment when I was sitting beside her bed in the care home, knowing the time to say goodbye forever was ticking inexorably towards me; in a few minutes I would have to rise up from the chair and take my last leave and the sadness broke over me like a wave and I could only wonder what would be the least inappropriate thing to say. "Goodbye" wasn't an option, so I settled on "I'll see you soon"; or at least that's what I attempted to say between sobs. You know those elegantly-played scenes at someone's deathbed in films? This was nothing like that. In contrast to my blubbering wreck, she was calm and beautiful. She smiled at me and told me God was guiding my steps, even when I didn't know it, and her faith bloomed out into the room as if it were golden light. Looking back on the moment, I replace the blubbering with all the things I should have said. But I console myself with the thought that the moment, however imperfect, happened. The idea that I may not have seen her one final time was so much worse than the badly-scripted goodbye I actually managed.

I was crying into the dough as it tore and crumbled. Too much butter had made it weak, a fact that Grandma would have been able to point out in time if she'd been beside me, no doubt.  Most upsetting of all was the fact that she had died in great pain and far too young; we should have had more time with her. Her elder sister is 90 and still plays the Drake church organ every Sunday. The family comes from hardy Mennonite farming stock, and the Dutch traditions, carried through Catherine the Great's Ukraine to New England and eventually Canada, meant that food was rich and filling and created to keep you going until sundown. Everything was baked with cinnamon. Nothing was wasted. I remember her showing me how to make shnetke (which I've no idea how you actually spell) with the remnants of pie crust pastry; she would roll out the scraps, sprinkle them with cinnamon and sugar and then roll them back up and bake them into little parcels of sweet, spicy heaven. The fragrant kitchen, and its satellite dominion the laundry room, were her empire, the only places in her world where she had any say, any control, like so many women both then and now. Looking back to my childhood for memories of her, I realise every single one of them involves food. I am sitting with Grandma at her kitchen table and I am so small my feet dangle from the chair; she is telling me why Christians believe in Jesus, and a bowl of nectarines on the table between us smells exotic and pink. There she is cutting a birthday cake; I don't remember whose, but it is prettily iced and blazing with candles. Then she is in her flowered peach kimono, cutting the segments of the grapefruit halves in the dark kitchen just before bed so that they are ready for us at the breakfast table next morning; we will bow our heads together and give thanks before tucking in with the specially serrated grapefruit spoons she laid at each place. And she beams from the other side of a towering stack of pancakes; Grandpa was thunderously disapproving of Grandma's sweet tooth later in life as his enthusiasm for health food took hold, and the pancakes were her minor act of rebellion and her proof of love to kids and grandkids. But Christmas was her moment of glory. The baking was planned several weeks before, and required a pantry overflowing with ingredients and hour upon hour devoted to converting the nuts and butter and coconut and raisins and spices and custard into pepernuts (three kinds, all cut into tiny little buttons of dough) and pinwheel cookies and nanaimo squares and umpteen other delicacies. The family Christmas cake recipe, passed down reverently for generations, was a specialty of hers and burst out of her kitchen every year in a unashamed riot of gleaming cherries and nuts. In her own act of rebellion, my mother later added whisky...Grandma never tasted alcohol as the Mennonites are teetotal.

But the fun memories; the rambles through the park in search of Saskatoon berries, the toboggan rides down snowy slopes at Fish Creek, the ice hockey games we watched all bundled up in parkas and clutching sweet hot chocolate, the scrambling around a baseball diamond on summer evenings: not one of them features Grandma. She was in the kitchen feeding a family of six, while Grandpa got to run around with the children. And I know, deep down, that my lack of talent with food isn't that at all; its my feminist statement, my attempt to address the age-old imbalance, or possibly just my fear that I might end up missing out too, chained by an apron to a stove while the menfolk get to do the fun stuff. But perhaps Grandma's God put that tree groaning with apples in my path after all; I suddenly find I am impelled to show my love for someone the way my Grandmother showed hers for me, with pancakes and pies and soups and breads.

I put an imperfect pie in front of David, in honour of the wonderful woman who was my Grandma, and promised myself not to fear either my talent or a lack thereof. My pie was over-buttered, undercooked, starred some rather wobbly attempts at pastry crosses...but we shared it, and it was delicious.