Patty Griffin's 2002 song "Making Pies" off her album "1000 Kisses," is a tribute to the activity described in the title, but it's a pretty bleak one. It's a quiet song of mourning and grief, about how the act of baking—the soothing rhythms ofmaking the dough,rolling the dough, shuffling the pies in and out of the oven—can be a balm, if only modestly, for the soul. The narrator of the song, who works at a bakery, is aging and lonely; a litany of the simple acts of routine life, the lyrics crescendo into a remembrance of a loved one lost to war.
What is there left for her? There is remembering her lover. There is being close to family—Griffin's narrator describes going to her sister's house for her nephew's birthday, volunteering at church. And there is making pies—for her a job, for most of us just an afternoon project. Pies are my favorite thing to bake because theyarea little bit of a project: there are a couple of steps to the process, and you can expect to set aside a few hours for it from start to finish. You use your hands and you can think of something else; you can look out the window, you can listen to music. And is there anything that happens in the kitchen that's more rewarding, more personally satisfying, than pulling a pie from the warm oven and finding it, after all your work, beautiful? I don't think there is.
