My grandmother's pies were balanced on her kitchen window sills like peach and apricot see-saws. But no cool air was coming in on those July afternoons, in the Pennsylvania of my childhood, with the red brick schoolhouse just across the yard, its old-fashioned bell silent by the time I came along, its gothic windows blocked or foreshortened, its tiny kitchen used for storage.
Aunt Ada made blueberry pies, Aunt Mame made cherry, but my grandmother only made peach—or a blissfully tart peach and apricot. As I got into my teens, the crusts were always burned and the bottoms sticky and raw. But when I was a child, the extra dough was baked with a little raspberry jam on top. Nothing in my adult life has given me as much pleasure as those fragile, fragrant disks that burned the roof of my mouth because I could not wait.
My mother was glad to get rid of me in June, and I didn't see her again until August.
Round steel tins covered in decoupage were stuffed full of icebox cookies—sugar cookies made from refrigerated dough sliced paper thin—and sugar cakes with three raisins ritualistically placed on top that were like biting sand.
So that I can't separate hot weather from the oven's bounty. I bake involuntarily, compulsively—therapeutically. I'm quite good at it.
There were no air conditioners or electric fans or smoke alarms in my grandmother's tall house. Gallon glass bottles of milk were left in a dewy silver box at the foot of the back steps, and crusty tablets of bread came out of a truck that idled in the alley. After dark, the farmer's wife delivered butter the color of daffodils—Mrs. Calhoun: why did she always come at night?
This simpler way of life is layered over the present like a subconscious dress pattern, and its agents are these loaves of bread I put on wire racks to cool.
The piano lessons and roadside fruit stands and after-church pot roasts of my childhood summers gather momentum in my memory as I head toward my birthday (I always requested orange sponge cake)—late July, the peonies and iris burned off and nothing but the hardy lilies and milkweed pointing their fingers toward the changeable sky.
I can hear the low thunder of a storm approaching. The sudden rain spits against the metal shutters but then stops—leaving us with the oppressive heat.
I punch down a dough that will make good sandwiches by lunchtime.
