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Applesauce at midnight

October 10, 2024   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

Do you sometimes have a day that just seems heavy? Like a day when the rain is a drench and the idea of driving – never mind walking – is a no-thank you. Like a day when you wake up sluggish and it’s all downhill from there…coffee or not.

Do you find the boast – ”made from scratch” silly because your mother and your grandmother made almost everything that way but we all got so used to buying food in a package that now anything “made from scratch” is a novelty? Not 100% proof of quality, of course.

Traffic – there’s all one needs for a heavy day. I recently was driving in a city and because of the who, the where and the why, I made a great many u-turns on busy city streets, holding up everybody, waving my thumbs-up like crazy while I was back-and-forth-ing, not to hit bollards, other legally parked cars – anyway, what with irrational one-way streets blocking me from going where I had to go and traffic lights that didn’t want me to turn where it was shorter …..I can only say, there was a good reason for each and every u-turn.

When I finally got to where I was going, there was a person in pain, waiting for me. The bright part was: not a single delivery van, not all those cars, not the big pickup truck usually in a hurry, not a single one beeped at me. They, all of them, put up with me without any complaint. 

Does the picture you have of yourself in your brain, which you don’t really think about much, ever look heavy…..

At the end of my u-turn day, there were dishes in the sink that stayed there and the cat had her usual list for me to attend to, it was almost more effort than it was worth to heat some soup and swipe some butter on a bit of toast but I’ll tell you what: by later in the evening, I wanted to make some applesauce – yes, from scratch. 

As a cook, I don’t peel much. Most of the flavour and the nutrients are just under the skin of the fruit or vegetable. If it can stay on, in my kitchen, it does. Including mashed potatoes when the skin breaks up under the masher, it gives a lovely nutty flavour to the dish.

So, the peel stayed on the apples and I washed and cored them, chopping them up any old how and put them in just enough water with nutmeg, cinnamon and a bit of grated ginger root. Good organic raw sugar. Left it to itself on a mild boil while we watched something silly on television for 20 minutes or thereabouts. Then we ate it still hot enough to need blowing. Leaving the skin on adds a bit of a bite and the peel is texture bits in the sauce but delicious. It was a little weird how good it felt to eat something as simple as applesauce. It was as kindly as all those drivers not beeping at my many u-turns.

To be fair, it is the job of all of us to have a little patience with the apparent foibles of others. One can never really know the inside of another’s life, another’s individual day in a life.

In Germany, where my uncle lived near a Black Forest town called Lahr, when we went to town and were walking to a place, every person acknowledged every other person with a quick nod and “tag” (good day). An extremely brief courtesy, easily offered. I do too here in Canada, in towns – just a quick hi/hello/nice day – that sort of thing and there are a number of responses, mostly with a second’s hesitation, not with the willing echo, one might almost say, in Lahr.

Sometimes, I am so bold as to compliment a person on a dress or a smile; or I can’t resist cracking a joke. Just to laugh on the spot with a stranger. It seems as though we are beginning to shake off some of the self-restraints that the COVID shutdowns instilled, although we still refer to them often. We continue to measure memories by the two years of severely altered lives.

We really are in limbo as a species. With so much bad news, we can hardly bear to turn on the broadcasts. Many of us have stopped turning on the news and wonder if we can still turn to each other as hands to hold when some of that news starts on us. We are increasingly different, with our technology as the centrefold of our lives. Our increasing and who knows, in the long run, how damaging is the addiction to involving our whole selves with the digital phantoms that play such big roles in our minute-to-minute existence?

There are so many needs mending and although the how-tos are crystal clear for most of it, those who can and know how complain that it’s heavy.

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