There’s a pie baking in the oven. Nothing fancy. Not even homemade. It’s a frozen Marie Callender’s Razzleberry pie, a family favorite. Hubster planned on baking an apple pie for Easter Sunday dessert.
Are you set on apple pie or are you open to suggestions? Are you making it or buying it? I sent him a message yesterday while he shopped for today’s lunch. E and his roommate are joining us. I holler at S. to ask to get her opinion.
“Umm, isn’t that more of a fall dessert? I will not eat it. Ask him to do something with berries. Berries are good right now, apples, not so much. But I’ll eat ice cream.”
Coconut cream, he replies.
Okay. Not arguing. She won’t eat that either, but most of us will.
We have lunch and make our way to take pictures in the bluebonnets. Some families are good about taking pictures in them every year. We like the idea of traditions, but sometimes we can’t keep up. Like the one year the rattlesnakes were bad and I didn’t want to chance it. Other years, they weren’t as showy. Then 2020, when bluebonnet pictures were the last thing on people’s minds for fear of getting sick. We skipped them. Not in the mood. Attended Easter service online. One year, the Texas Snowpocalypse ruined them. Followed by another freeze. Then one of those, we’ll get to it, we’ll get to it, but we never got to it.
In the meantime, the kids have grown. E has his own apartment. S. is in high school. It’s been a while. Was it actually ten years? Really? I look at social media posts and I think it’s correct. Wow. Ten years of putting it off.
We had lunch and headed out. It’s the sweet spot of the season. They’re popping and in a week or so they’ll go to seed. There will be some places where they’ll last a little longer, but soon they will make way for other flowers to have their turn. There’s no sense in driving out to find the perfect place when there are plenty nearby. We take our Chihuahua mix, Reeses, and Dipper, our newest addition.
Family pictures are hard enough. Add two dogs, one being five months old, along with zooming cars on the highway, and we remember why it was such a chore. We got a few good shots with many bad ones, but that’s where the fun lives. The outtakes of those bad photos are where memories seared themselves into our souls.
The pie is cooling. If we cut into it too soon, the filling oozes out. We can wait though. The kids took the dogs to a dog park and just returned. My Polaroid camera sits next to my laptop. I have 5 pictures left to take. One came out over-exposed, but E. is keeping it anyway. That’s how pictures turned out back in the day. You’d take what you could get, saving film for important moments, we explain. Special moments. Memory making moments.
Taking time to document days like this, in picture-words, brings life to seemingly mundane days. It’s in the mundane where life happens. In the ordinary where we experience the extraordinary. We take slices out of our lives and savor them. Some days, we slice right in. Others, we need to wait, that’s what makes it good.
I like pie! I hear E. announce as a seven year old. We pick up where we leave off. Go back to the bluebonnets to take pictures. Pick up those moments we somehow allowed to escape us, bringing the pieces back together.
There is pie with ice cream, ready to eat. And a new set of bluebonnet pictures, documenting the changes in between.
Nerds Beget Nerds 