Pie Crust
by Kathleen Naureckas
Every time I make a two-crust pie,
I cut vents to let the steam out. I cut
them the same way always: a long,
thin S-shape in the middle, three tilted
slashes on each side. I’ve done it that
way from the first pie I ever made.
I never had to stop to think how, but
one day I asked myself why. I knew,
really: that’s how my mother did it.
I didn’t know there was another way.
The next time I shared a phone call with
my two sisters, I asked them how they
pierced their pies. They did it the same
way I did, the way they learned from
Mother. “I asked her once why she did
it that way,” said my older sister.
“She said that’s how her mother did it.”
I wish I could call up my grandmother
and ask her where and how she learned
to make a pie, but she died before I was
born. I’d like to picture a bridge of pies
stretching back across time and
the Atlantic all the way to Ireland, an
art bequeathed from mother to daughter
to daughter, like mitochondrial DNA.
PHOTO: Kathleen Naureckas’s apple pie.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Kathleen Naureckas is a retired journalist whose poems have appeared in a number of journals, including Bluestem, Light, Measure, and Willow Review. Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, For the Duration, in 2012. (Author photo by Furla Photography and Video, 2011)
Silver Birch Press 