Apple Crisp, Samhain, and the Dead

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 fiancĂ©’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.