Harvest Pie

“Marnie, this pie is delicious. You must give me the recipe!”

The compliment warms her over. While she sells her baked goods every Saturday at the Farmer’s Market, she rarely gets such effusive praise.

“I’m so happy to hear that, dear. I tweaked an ingredient or two but used my mother’s old recipe for harvest pie. I’ll write it down and share it once I update the recipe card.” She drops change in the young woman’s hand and goes back to cutting the last pieces of her pie. She only brought 12 pies with her this morning, so she’ll need to close shop soon.

She squirms with delight on her old stool. Her booth is quite popular today. And while she hasn’t had a long line of people the way Sam’s Lemonade Shake stand always does, she has had a steady stream of familiar faces. Today’s sales will go to buying seeds next spring for her garden. All is not lost!

“Is this mincemeat pie?” A middle-aged man with glasses and a plaid shirt stands at the display pushing his index finger into the glass. “Mincemeat is my favorite. My mom used to make it every Thanksgiving when she was alive.”

Smiling, Marnie responds sweetly, “Close. This is my harvest pie recipe. It’s a slightly tweaked heirloom recipe, based on what was ready in my garden.”

“That sounds like a delight. I’ll take two slices please. My wife will give me the fifth degree if I eat this in front of her and don’t bring her back some too.” He grins broadly at the sweet treat, as she hands him two plates. Marnie hopes his first bite brings back fond memories of holidays past.

Minutes later, the final delicate slices are sold. She packs the tables, tent, display case, plates, and napkins into her hatchback and drives home.

Her ranch one-level shares a driveway with two other families. And it’s days like this when Marnie is especially grateful to have people nearby. Days after a restless night of baking, when things can take a detrimental toll.

She lets loose a bedraggled sigh when she walks into the comfort of her kitchen. She didn’t notice the aches and pains in her back while she was already halfway through her morning at the Farmer’s Market, when there was nothing to be done about it. But now, it’s almost too much to bear. Wrinkled, work-worn hands untie the apron she didn’t realize she was still wearing until it pinched when she sat. She’s doesn’t even get up to hang the apron on the hook she always uses. She balls it up and throws it on the kitchen counter from across the table.

Selling at the Farmer’s Market was necessary to cover expenses, especially now that John is gone. The mess from preparing 12 harvest pies for market through the night mars her usually tidy workspace. Her jar of earnings sits next to the mess.

“It was worth it.” Yet, as she speaks the words out loud she feels it ring false in her bones. She covers the lie by digging deeper. She sighs and mumbles, “Good work, Marnie. Rest later, now you clean.”

At the sink, she picks at a crusty bit from a dirty pie dish and holds it up close to examine it.

The gritty crust is golden, with specks here and there. Evidence of the single change she made to her mother’s recipe — cornmeal. It can better accommodate the filling’s texture and bitter flavor. She isn’t hungry, so instead of making a sandwich she washes dishes. As she stacks the hand-washed plates, dishes, and utensils in the dishwasher, a loud thud on the window over the sink makes her jump.

“Oh, my! Bout thought I had a heart attack. That thump better not be Jimmy and Jeremy playing baseball in my driveway.” As she speaks the words, she knows that would be impossible because the driveway is in the front of the house and the kitchen faces the secluded backyard.

She opens and closes the sliding door leading to the back deck to see what that noise was about. A large bird had broken it’s poor neck and now lays at an odd angle directly below the window. An unfortunate result of hiring a cleaning crew to detail clean every window, both outside and inside. This was the fourth bird this week. Poor thing.

No use in letting it sit there and gather flies. She sweeps the corpse into a dustpan and carries it down the stairs into her wild tangle of garden … or what is left of it. The sound of the crunch under her shoes makes her angry enough for a hot tear to slide down her wrinkled cheek. The thought of all the beautiful, pollinator friendly plants that were growing in between every crop — all the almost ripe fruits of her labor.

Now, there is no longer any green. Tall stalks and empty husks are nearly all that is left after the swarm of locusts took root on Thursday afternoon. Their black and green exoskeletons merged into a mass of clicking and eating. They came out of nowhere and ate everything. Everything. All those ripe, juicy tomatoes, melons, beans, and corn. And when she saw the decimation from her kitchen sink window, her heart dropped deeper than John’s grave. She may have well been one of the husks they left behind. She was both despondent and mortified. She’d told all her friends at church that she’d be at the Farmer’s Market and she’d bring special pies made with ingredients straight from her garden, the strawberries, the tomatoes, the zucchinis.

As Thursday turned to Friday, anger took root much the same way the locusts had. Bare dirt seemed to glare through the roughly incised stems and leaves, straight into Marnie’s tender heart. Those monsters with wings were eating everything she’d worked for all summer. She promised her friends!

In that moment of pure desperation, she remembered her mother’s recipes, gathering dust and grease droplets in a tin over the stove mantel. Her mother had lived through the Great Depression. There must be something in that box that applies to this situation.

There. Between the cards detailing how to make chipped beef and navy bean soup: Harvest pie.

“When locusts swarm and nothing else is left.” That note made the decision for her.

The hardest part about making harvest pie is catching the locusts. Time was of the essence, so she marched out to the garden shed to get her butterfly net and a trash bag. Hours later, as night fell, she dripped sweat from jumping on the trash bag every time she added more locusts, but her trash bag was full.

Only now, after a night of the heavy labor and selling every one of her creations this morning, Marnie feels she can breathe a sigh of relief.

“I always recoup my losses.” She announces as she tamps dirt over the bird’s dead body.

She stands, and seemingly out of nowhere, a swarm of locusts descends directly onto her head and shoulders. She swats at them and knocks a few off but more fill the cracks in the air around her. All she can hear is their clicking and she’s fighting for breath. Her only escape is the kitchen, so she runs up the deck stairs and straight into the sliding glass door that she closed when she walked outside a moment ago.

Everything goes silent. The locusts dissolve away from her prone body. Her neck is bent at an odd angle.