Peach Cobbler
By Lynn D. Gilbert
Oops! I spill the fat folder of dessert recipes
all over the kitchen floor. Now they’re not arranged
in their original strata, the order in which they were
laid down. I’m not brave enough to look yet, but
I suppose my folded clutch of pecan pie recipes
has been thrown to the winds. I know I’ll have to sift
these fallen leaves to collect them: at the holidays,
I’ll need to combine several variants—molasses
or cane syrup? Three eggs or four? Here’s
a very old Brown Betty in the tiny Elite font
of my late mother’s typewriter. Pears in red wine
from a friend lost track of eons ago.
Scotch shortbread from the mother of my advisor
for the Ph.D. I never finished….Peach cobbler
was what I set out to find when I dropped the whole
caboodle. A neighbor wrote out her grandmother’s
simple recipe for it on notebook paper in a loose,
looping hand…. Cranberry nut bread from my first
stepmother, now dead, and tiramisu from
the second, also gone. The easy Key lime pie I love,
from the friend I met at our common insufferable job.
The whole file is emblematic of a life—
yellowed newsprint, labels off boxes and bottles,
ragged magazine pages, 3x5 cards, fading ink
from hands mostly withered and gone. And right on top
falls the half-day drill for candied orange peel.
(A frosted bale of hoarded peelings nags me
each time I open the freezer.) Still, today’s challenge
is cobbler. Ah! I spot the childlike hand. Here it is!
Seven fresh peaches lie waiting. I put the kettle on
for hot water to blanch them. I’ll peel, pit, and slice them
one by one into the measure. Then heat the oven,
mix the batter. The shaggy pile of paper on the counter
must wait. While the cobbler bakes—crust browning, edges
bubbling with butter and juice—I’ll savor the sweet-tartness
of all those decades of good news shared.
Lynn D. Gilbert's poems, twice nominated for Pushcart Prizes, have appeared in such journals as After Happy Hour Review, Arboreal, Blue Unicorn, carte blanche, Hamilton Stone Review, The MacGuffin, and Sheepshead Review. A founding editor of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, she lives in an Austin suburb and reviews poetry submissions for Third Wednesday journal.