Shirley

Applesauce, Shirley Kurtz, illustrated by Cheryl Benner, Good Books, 1992 Applesauce (cont’d) Because things change. It’s a different century. We’re mostly limping along by ourselves. No house in West Virginia anymore, backed up to a hill. No outsize garden meant to feed a tribe. The boy and the sister and the little terror of a brother all have families of their own. Three decades on, on a Sunday in September, we’re just two tired old heads. That night at supper, goes the story, they ate the last of the applesauce. All her jars were empty, the boy’s mother said. It was time to make more. Our cupboard’s not bare—we’re not Old Mother Hubbards. We still have applesauce. But we’d hate to run out.   The very next evening, when they were on the way home from town, going up Knobley Mountain, she told the father to stop the car, quick. Over there where she was pointing, in somebody’s yard, was a tree. It’s loaded. It’s neglected. Free apples? she wonders. “May...

Going By the Lady “ And that’s it,” says the lady . “That—right there—is mascarpone. Ten minutes, two ingredients. I told you it was easy.” You watch over and over. The spoon coats. The bubbles bubble. The whole big puddle pours down into the sieve lined with cheesecloth . HELP, you text the lady next day, because you cooked some but your sieve full seems too limp. You dripped it all last night in the fridge. How’s it cheese? “ You put in the lemon juice?” she ask s. Y es, y ou did. “Maybe too many cheesecloth layers?” you say. “Stir it around,” she says. “Then let it drip some more in the fridge .” It drips, drips. It makes another middling pond in the bowl, like before. But it doesn’t much stiffen. And the lady doesn’t have any you can borrow, when you ask. Your sad lump is your only hope. You take it over to her house—the whole thing—the bowl, the sieve, the draggy cloth, your so-called mascarpone. The lady pushes it around with her spoon, slaps her lips smartly. “Yep, t...