Making Mud Pies in the Spring


 When driving along a back road the other day, I noticed a stream overflowing its banks as spring begins to push winter aside. I had to stop. The stream reminded me of days gone by when my cousins and I played outside until we were dragged back inside, dripping wet from playing in oversized streams and puddles created by the melting snow. As I took a few photos, I thought about our making mud pies. That led me to thinking about our grandmother making her pies. There really wasn't much of a difference-in the process.

Our grandmother never had to reference a recipe or use a measuring cup when making her pie crusts which always ended up heavenly flaky and the perfect texture. With perfection, she would fold the ingredients in to the yellow mixing bowl until she had it all where she wanted it. After gathering the dough into a ball, then kneading it and working it, she'd divide the dough, flatten it out with her wooden rolling pin and then spread it out in her glass pie plates, fluting the edges of the crust in lightning speed.
While prepackaged crusts cut down the preparation time to nearly nothing, their flavor and consistency lack what my grandmother created every time she made one of her pies which included-apple, pumpkin, mincemeat, berry.
Of all the varieties she made, my favorite was her Lemon Meringue! Those pies were masterpieces of creativity. The lemons used were real. The crusts, as I've explained, perfection. The meringue, peaked and browned, melted in your mouth.
If our grandmother happened to be pie-making as Spring was waking up the fields and pastures, it was a given that my cousins and I would be outside playing in the little streams Nature provided as the snow melted and buds pushed through the thawing soil. That's when we'd be making our own pies-mud pies of all varieties.
Some would be decorated with tiny stones; some with sticks and old dead leaves. It didn't matter as long as we were making our pies. Although they were void of those heavenly crusts, the process of creating them was the same as our grandmother's.
Her pies just tasted better!

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