I am going to make a strong claim here: apple pie is superior to any other dessert.
Maybe that’s a bold thing to say.   Admittedly, it’s biased, but I have good, hard empirical evidence to support the claim. A memory counts as empirical evidence, right?

It was May 1 and I was 8. That part I remember clearly, because I was so confused. It went against every childhood milestone that I impatiently waited for when May arrived. It was supposed to be the month when the sun starts to timidly peek around the cloud walls of Seattle winter; the month when the shorts and swim suits and sandals come out of their starchy cardboard storage boxes in the basement, when they almost seem to stretch their arms and blink their sleepy eyes and demand a little summertime dirt to warm them up; the month when the blue forget-me-nots suddenly apparate out of the ground as if from a flick of Dumbledore’s wand. May. Of course. So who exactly allowed this snow on the ground?

Two inches of snow, to be exact. I remember wrinkling my eyebrows. It hadn’t snowed all year. All year 10-year-old sister Sarah and I had desperately waited for a snow day, for any kind of ice on the road, anything kind of winter-y weather conditions at all to cancel school. Now it was May, a Saturday in May nonetheless, and here pompous Snowy McSnowerson flings open the door and waltzes in. The nerve.

Sarah and I moped into the kitchen. “Well girls,” my mother said, tightening the knot on her green L.L Bean fleece bathrobe. “How about some apple pie?”
We had never made anything from scratch, let alone pie. Mom set to work after checking if the roads were clear enough and driving to buy a literal ton of apples. I remember the kitchen counter absolutely piled with Fiji and Golden Delicious and Macintosh apples, like a teeny pyramid. I stationed myself opposite Mom and Sarah, kneading dough and rolling it thin, while they massacred the poor apples into slivers at the cutting board.

I remember one distinct feeling: cozy. I felt warm and safe, surrounded by my beautiful mother and my partner-in-crime sister, while aromas of apples and sugar wafted around the room. It was a soft moment, all of us still in our flannel P.J.s, feeling deliciously quaint.

There was no fighting that afternoon. There was no stomping, no scraped knees, no bickering over “borrowed” clothes and who tinkled on the toilet because it wasn’t me, Mom make her go clean it up. There were no other houses. No world at all. Just us three, humming along to Crosby Stills and Nash in the kitchen, twirling in the cinnamon on the ground and in the air and in our hearts, criss-crossing strips of crust over our marinated masterpiece. Sarah and I each snuck a gooey slice of apple, and we all lowered the pie into the oven.

It spent an hour in the oven and was the best thing I had ever tasted. And now, every new apple pie I try has a dash of cinnamon and a hint of that memory. So I again make the big claim: apple pie superior to any other deserts because, arrest me on account of being a Hallmark card, but it’s just plain baked with love.