Mar 11, 2011 09:54
My mother is from Newfoundland, Canada, and most years she spends the late summer there, visiting. In 1998, I was able to join her for a couple of weeks. That year, she was staying at the little house she used to own, a couple of 'gardens' over from her father's. We had electricity, but no phone and only an old oil-burning oven and stove.
On the blustery morning of September 2, I crawled out of my bed and went downstairs to the kitchen. Mom was in the little living room, with the television on, watching the news. The news was bad that morning. An airplane carrying more than 200 people had crashed off the coast of Nova Scotia, near Peggy's Cove. There were no survivors.
For Newfoundlanders, this was close to home. Peggy's Cove is a lot like many of the small fishing communities in Newfoundland. Lots of us have people there. I'd been there myself, visiting my great aunt and uncle, and stood on the rocks that were now being shown on the news. It brought back memories of the 1985 crash in Gander, Newfoundland, that had killed more than 250 people.
While we watched the news from Peggy's Cove, there was a pounding at the door, my aunt's voice yelling for us. We assumed she was coming over to alert us to the plane crash, but we were wrong about that. My uncle, Mom and my aunt's brother, in Massachusetts had had a heart attack. He had survived it, but was in the hospital and we were awaiting updates.
There seemed only one thing to do. Make pie.
We had spent a day picking blueberries, and someone, I think another uncle, had requested blueberry pie, so blueberry pie it would be. We threw our berries and some sugar, butter, and flour into a crust while attempting to heat up the old oven. The wind outside was battering the house as the news on the television became more and more bleak. The oven temperature refused to rise over about 300 degrees or so as the wind blew into the stove pipe from the outside. We decided to put the pie in anyway. We left it in there for hours, checking it periodically only to find the center uncooked. We kept it in there until the edges began to burn. Still the center was uncooked. Of course, we ate it anyway. It stained our tongues deep purple and was tolerably edible. We called it our 'disaster pie.' The pie was a disaster, the crash was a disaster, my uncle's health was a disaster, the whole day was one big disaster.
Today feels like the kind of day when one should stay home and make a disaster pie. I have the news streaming from Hawaii, monitoring the tsunami's arrival on that state's shores. I am carefully avoiding images and news from Japan, where things are far more heartbreaking and horrific. I am too easily traumatized to handle such things. The weather here, nearly as far from Hawaii as you can get and still be in the US, is wet and warm. The feet-deep piles of snow are rapidly melting, swelling up the streams and rivers, flooding the roads and the basements, creating a more minor, but noteworthy enough, little disaster of our own. I'm at work, so there will be no pie, but I've got a comfortingly hot cup of coffee and some Munchkins. They're going to have to do. Hopefully no other news will come my way.
in the news,
disaster pie,
newfoundland