Thread by @sometimesalight

On Wednesday, I made #allthepies--apple, pecan, pumpkin.

Or so I thought...

A thread.

If you know anything about me, you know I love pie & love making pies. You also know that my husband @n_d_anderson & I garden & can. You also know that I love hanging out on Twitter.

So Wednesday was a fun day for me: making the pies, hanging out on Twitter, talking about life in Appalachia. I made my pecan first & then went downstairs to grab pumpkin off the shelf.

Now @n_d_anderson does a lot of the canning around here & most of the time that's best for everyone. He's a pro, really.

https://twitter.com/n_d_anderson/status/1310916996268163074?s=20

Stuff the fresh produce in a glass jar, water bath or pressure cook it, & write the year's date on top & you're done. A thing of beauty.

So I went downstairs to grab some pumpkin off the shelf & the first jars I found had "16" marked on them. As in 2016! It probably was safe enough, but this was Thanksgiving so I found ones w/ the all important "20" on top & went about my business.

Pies baked up nicely, etc, etc. and we laid them out for after dinner. During dinner yesterday, we were chatting about how garden did & what came in that year & Nathan says something to the effect that he didn't can pumpkin this year.

WHICH WAS NEWS TO ME

***Pause for flashback***

Back in the spring, a friend & reader send me a lovely note about how much #HumbleRoots had meant to her. She included a bag of heirloom seeds & suggested I plant. She didn't know whether they would grow or not but that I should at least try them.

Dear reader, they grew. And grew. And grew. And grew to the size of a small toddler & looked like this:

So instead of having pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving Dinner, we ended up with CUSHAW pie which was just as lovely. But also a bit surprising.

More info on cushaw: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucurbita…

I do not know the moral of this story. Other than maybe we should start to label our jars. Or maybe it's that life has a way of delighting & surprising you.

Maybe, it's that we think we're doing one thing & we're really doing something else & you can't know until it's all said & done. Maybe you'll never know. Maybe you'll never know you baked a pumpkin pie w/ cushaw.

Or maybe it's as simple as the fact that we should grow cushaw & make pie more often than we do.

I just know that of everything that 2020 has brought, the tale of the cushaw pie masquerading as pumpkin will stay with us for a very long time.