Apples and Autobiography

Cortland apples.

This is a classic "writer's autumn" for me: bringing out a novel in print at last, while also working on a book version of the Vermont memoir I began after Dave's death. (Segments piled up on Medium; if you're curious, read them here.)

In writing the memoir as segments that I placed online, I excavated a heck of a lot of trauma. That turned out to be healthy for me -- but only, I think, because I grew through it, and now I'm in a stage of life that I loosely label "getting off the trauma merry-go-round." Life is good, and I want to pull the pieces together and show how that happened.

So the working title for the book is LOOKING FOR THE LIGHT, and today in chapter 2, I'm writing about apples and related recipes and reasons.  Here's a scrap:

Today I still rely on a shelf of traditional cookbooks, but it’s leavened (that’s a baking powder term!) with vegetarian ones, a paleo gem, international and ethnic compendiums, and, most important for this region, the Bentley Farm Cookbook.

This astonishing volume, eight and a half by twelve inches across the front and more than an inch thick, contains the hand-lettered recipes of one of the region’s beloved home cooks, Virginia Bentley. When I complimented a slice of pie at a community dinner last year and (as we do here) asked for the recipe, the baker said, “Oh, it’s Virginia’s, from the book. You have the book, of course.” She wasn’t asking me whether I had it—she knew I must.

Here's the cookbook, with a bit of the apple portion of the index, and a recipe to show you how different Virginia Bentley could be in how she talked about cooking.