She Brought Pie

Is there anything this good country doesn't have?

It turns out it has a pie lady, Beth Howard, who traveled from Eldon, Iowa to bring pies to Newtown.  When her husband died several years ago, she found her sorrows eased when she made pies. Since then she opened a pie stand, wrote a memoir about pie baking and when she heard what happened in Newtown, she posted a message on Facebook that day: perhaps pies could help in some way. According to stories that have run in papers across the country, she loaded up her RV with crates of apples and other ingredients, many donated, and she stopped off for home baked pies in a small town along the way, made by people who said they’d bake too. When she arrived, she passed out slices to anyone who wanted one and then baked more. She taught high school students and little ones how to make a fine crust.

It made me think of a line from To Kill a Mockingbird,  “Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between.” 

I thought about how Howard made this town, more than 1,000 miles from her own home, her neighborhood. She did what people do when someone becomes ill or, in this case, falls on the hardest of times. They bring soup by;  they drop a casserole off on the front porch.

“Heard you could use a lift,” they say, only without the words.