If you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger.
– Kahlil Gibran
I always wanted to look like my mom’s mom, at least a little, but I resemble my great-grandmother Myrtle Mirah Mell, by a whopping 81 percent, or so FamilySearch says when I do the “Compare a Face” activity.
Born in 1873, Great-Grandmother Mell is my dad’s mom’s mom. I never knew her, and to say I was disappointed is an understatement.
We called my mom’s mother Granny or Gran. I always thought that name much more euphonious than “grandma,” but probably only because it was attached to my grandmother.
Leola Antene Bradbury was born to Czech immigrant parents in the Bohemian Hills of northcentral Kansas where a group of Czechs settled.
Covered with sandstone, limestone, and prairie grass, the land didn’t yield bumper crops like the rich loam of the river bottom where my granddad’s family farmed.
Gran was the last of 12 children, born when her dad was 57 and her mom 45, and, true to their reputation, her Bohemian family loved music and dancing.
Her father, trained as a concert violinist in Vienna and played a mean polka at the Bohemian Hall dances. The family was poor, and Gran felt mortified she had to wear her brother’s boots to the one-room schoolhouse.
Even after she married her sweetheart, she never forgot that poverty. Perhaps that’s why she loved her garden and orchard so much.
By the time I came along, my grandparents had a mature orchard with pear and apple trees. Many years at apple picking time, I tagged after my grandmother, marveling at the small woman in front of me, carrying a large metal bucket in each hand.
She wore clodhopper shoes, polyester pants, a cobbler apron covering her cotton blouse, and a babushka over her hair. She placed the two buckets on the ground and plucked the apples off the tree with a long-handled apple picker rigged up by Granddad, but she also set me to work picking up every single one that had fallen to the ground.
I still remember the smell of ripe apples. Perhaps they were fermenting in the hot, humid Kansas air because the scent was rich and potent. Their skin was pearled a delicate pink with white flesh beneath. Birds chirped, and flies, wasps, and bees droned, all eager for a nip of the intoxicating apple juice.
After we filled the buckets and carried them into the kitchen, Mom hid her disgust at the half-rotten, worm-eaten, bird-pecked fruit. She chose the whole, firm apples to fill her colander.
We each had a thin, sharp paring knife. Gran started at the top of the apple and peeled around to the bottom, all in one curving peel.
“You’re wasting a lot of the apple,” she would scold Mom and demonstrated by slicing every bit of the sound flesh into the pot. I hacked away at my lot, but didn’t receive a scolding since I was a beginner though I never could duplicate Gran’s skill even over the years.
Soon, the apples were bubbling on the stove, seasoned with cinnamon, nutmeg, and sugar. The smell permeated the entire house, even upstairs into the bedrooms and down into the creepy cellar.
And the taste? Like melt-in-the-mouth apple pie without the crust. It could have been the apples that gave the sauce its delectable flavor. I’ve never seen any quite like them in the store, so I finally asked my older brother.
He said they were early heirlooms, but he didn’t know their name. I was convinced then—and still am—that the applesauce was delicious because it was infused with Gran’s love.
Ted and I have only one apple tree, a golden delicious. This year, after the deer and birds had their share, and it finally frosted enough to bring out the sugar, we ended up with a bushel basket full.
Some of the apples were beautiful, green skin blushed a rosy pink and the meat firm and white inside, but others are worm-eaten, bird-pecked, and half-rotten. I cut out the bad spots and worked them up anyway. I have a handy, dandy apple corer, peeler, and slicer, and I spent one full day making applesauce.
By nightfall, my back, hips, and feet ached, but the smell of simmering apples, spiced with pure vanilla and cinnamon filled our house. I washed my hands which were stained a walnut brown. Large for a woman and now wrinkled like old brown gloves, my hands resembled my grandmother’s.
FamilySearch doesn’t do a “Compare Hands” activity, but I felt satisfied I’d inherited at least a little of Gran’s character. And I have to admit, my applesauce is scrumptious, the smell, the taste taking me back into a Kansas kitchen with Gran and Mom standing at the sink with colanders full of apples.
What about my great-grandmother, Myrtle Mirah Mell? With an 81 percent facial resemblance, chances are I resemble her in other ways. Her daughter, my grandma Austin, told me stories about her mother’s hard life in Oklahoma and her gentle, modest ways, so modest, in fact, that her children never knew when she was pregnant, and she always referred to bulls as papa cows, but she was a great cook, making do with what she had and even coming up with special treats.
She would dip molasses out of a barrel and ladle it into cookie dough to make, her daughter said, the most mouth-watering cookies. I’m convinced their sweetness came not just from the molasses, but from love.
Genetics, Applesauce, Love
