Life is a bowl of cherries

Alison and I were talking about Thanksgiving. Team Reed is hosting this year, so I was thinking about stuff we needed to buy. Anti-chocolate, anti-cake, anti most traditional desserts, I asked her what she might think she'd want for dessert on the big day.

"Well, I might try pie," she said. "I've never had pie. I like cherries. I might like cherry pie."

Sad, isn't it? I'm sure her thighs and complexion will be the better for it, but who would have thought a child of mine would make it a full decade, and then some, without having pie pass her lips.

What's even funnier (to me) is that my sister Nancy is in charge of desserts. We were talking about what she might make and she said people will expect a pumpkin pie. She was worried because she's never made one before.

"Well who are these people with expectations? It's just us. If you don't want to make pumpkin pie, just don't make it," said I, the sane and reasonable one. (I don't really like pumpkin pie...)

"You HAVE to have pumpkin pie," frets Nancy.

I silently agreed to disagree with her and came up with this bombshell. "Hey, you know, if I was in charge of desserts, I'd just go buy a pumpkin pie."

"Buy one?" she mused. "BUY one. Yeah. I could BUY a pie."

And just like that, I saved Thanksgiving. But back to Alison.

Today at Kroger, I spied half a cherry pie in the buy-it-now-before-it-molds basket. "Hey, Ali, wanna try a cherry pie?"

Wrestling with an armload of cherry acai flavored yogurt, she looked at it from all sides. "It's kinda big. Think they have a smaller one?" asked my practical daughter.

We looked. They had individual (fresher) slices of pumpkin and pecan, but no cherry.

"Let's try this. It's on sale, and if you don't like it, we'll have to throw away only half a pie."

Life intervened and she didn't get to the pie until I came home a bit ago from seeing Breaking Dawn with some friends of mine. I'm glad I saw it. Silly, but fun with good friends.

So Ali has the pie out and greets me, "Hey Mom! Cherry pie is awesome."

She's getting out the ice cream and is going to have a whole slice. I'm not sure why I think this is great, but I like the culinary expansion. Heretofore, her dessert range has been sugar cookies, sugar cookie dough, sugar cookie and some cake icing, vanilla ice cream and frozen yogurt.

She dives in. The ice cream vanishes as if it was never there. "Uh. Guys. Does cherry pie go bad?"

"Well, it can be tart," we say.

She moves some cherries around. "Do you have to eat this part?" She forks the crust.

Sigh. Guess the people at work will like the pie tomorrow...

Maybe if I'd made it from scratch? Nah.

The way I see it, Alison's life is a big ol' bowl of cherries. Who needs 'em in a pie?