I have been making apple crisp today. Today I stood in the kitchen and swilled vodka and worked through the pain; I mixed brown sugar and flour and butter; I chopped thin slices of apples the Ogre had skinned; I sprinkled cinnamon on it all and I baked. I baked until my feet ached; I’m still picking dough out from under my fingernails.
The entire time I felt as if I were on the edge of something. The edge of some…epiphany.
My mom brought me all these apples and I knew I needed to make crisp with them, and I knew I needed to do it this weekend because it was Samhain. There is something in my head telling me there’s a connection between making apple crisp…and the dead.
And so today I stood in my fiancé’s kitchen and baked and grasped…and could not hold onto it. Whatever IT was, whatever epiphany I’d been searching for, some clarity to the vague shapes in my brain, I could not find it. I could not grasp it.
I stood and I mixed flour and sugar and butter with my hands, and with every turn of them in the bowl I felt closer to the truth.
And still it slipped away from me.
So the Ogre and I ate apple crisp and ice cream after our dinner. Tomorrow I go home, and I take one crisp with me. I will offer it to my ancestors, I will offer it to my Father. I will offer apples to the dead, to The Lord of Death.
Maybe someday I’ll know why.