recipe card microstories: applesauce

you are the apple of my eye

The last time my mother made applesauce, she was wearing her grandmother’s lace blouse, faded ivory. Standing at the stove, stirring a pot of crabapples with the wooden spoon that mixed decades of cookie batter and stews. The aroma of apples steeped in cider and cinnamon.

Today, the orchard is littered with the rotting husks of autumn’s crabapple crop. No beach towels on the clothesline, only weatherworn clothespins laden with dew.

And if I sit still long enough, a ghostly whiff of that last batch of applesauce returns, its tart chalkiness as bittersweet a memory of what once was.

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This excerpt from my longer essay “Silent Spring,” was published in Longridge Review, Winter 2019.

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