Moving

Recipe: Apple Crumble ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The first recipe I’ve cooked in America, Malawi, and Scotland. Apples seems to be pervasive in all three places and I feel like there’s something about apples, and apple desserts specifically, that are reminiscent of home.

Ingredients:
The filling
Four apples, cored and diced.
1/3c sugar
1 tsp cinnamon

The topping
1 1/3 c flour
1/2 c sugar
Enough butter to bind the flour and sugar (usually about half a stick)

Butter a 9 inch square baking dish, pre-heat the oven to 190C, 375F. Take about half of the diced apples and line the bottom of the baking dish. Sprinkle about half of the filling’s cinnamon and sugar over top. Repeat for the second layer. In a separate bowl mix flour and sugar. Take small cubes of the butter and use a fork to cut them into the flour and sugar until the whole mixture resembles a bowl of dried peas. Pour this evenly on top of the apples, and bake for 30-45 minutes. Longer is better because the apples become more mushy. Mmmm. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

     Over the past three months I’ve found myself living in three different places, in three different countries, on three separate continents. As a consequence, I have had to do a lot of moving and have realized there’s one aspect of moving people don’t talk about all that often: stuff. It is absolute incredible the amount of stuff that accumulates in the process of living somewhere. I’ve found this out in miniature every time I’ve moved, but none of it compared to (or really prepared me for) the process of moving out of the house I grew up in.
     Moving out of the house you grew up in is in itself a pretty strange experience. On the one hand, I haven’t lived there in over seven years. On the other hand, it was always comforting to know it was there; that somewhere on the earth was my bedroom, arranged as it always had been, sitting in my house, surrounded by my yard, where I used to play. What I hadn’t realized was that there was also an attic-full of things that had been accumulating since my birth.
      It’s fairly daunting to be faced with an entire room-full of giant boxes you have to sift through to decide what to throw away and what to keep. Even more so because there’s actually a strange phenomena of memory that plays into filtering through items from one’s past. Objects that you never in a million years would have remembered by yourself suddenly turn up and strike a chord of memory so profound that there is certainly no way you could ever throw them away. It is for this reason that in my permanent abode, whenever I finally get one, every available wall (including the bathroom) will be entirely lined with books, and all the surface areas will be covered with stuffed animals.
     You find strange things when sorting through an entire house. Searching through my office I stumbled on the notebook I used for second grade Spanish. I should have just tossed it out, but when I saw the sentence “Estoy muy contento porque ayer encontre un pato con cinco ptitos (sic)” written in my enormous and awkward scribble I simply couldn’t. Ditto a valentine from eighth grade that says, among other things “I like ham, do you like ham? Ham ham ham.” Ditto a letter home to my parents telling them how much I was enjoying space camp, and especially a picture taken in seventh grade of me and my six closest friends at the time, all of us dressed up in ridiculous costumes and standing in front of a painted beach scene.
     And while sorting through all of this stuff, and throwing a good portion of it out, was definitely a bit sad, what was really amazing to me was realizing how much of it is still relevant to my life now. I still speak Spanish on a regular basis, the sender of the valentine is one of my best friends, and I even communicate with a few of my friends from that year of space camp. As for the photograph from seventh grade, even though it was taken twelve years ago, I still saw everyone in it when I came home.
     I went through a similar sorting process in miniature when I came to Scotland, trying to fit everything valuable of my life into the weight restrictions for international luggage. I brought a lot of necessities of course, warm clothes, a cookbook, various journals, but I also brought a journal for recording all my bird-sightings, a book titled “Goodnight Washington, DC”, a carving of a lemur I’ve had since I was about ten, a scarf knitted for me by a Malawian neighbor, and a sweater that declares that while I’m not from Wayne Maine, I got there as fast as I could (truth!). And in a very different way, those things are just as important to me as sheets or running shoes are.
     There’s a reason we don’t just throw sentimental items out, a reason we continue to pack and re-pack items of varying importance, but of great significance. A reason we print out pictures and stick them in various albums and frames. Because wherever you are, the things around you aren’t just objects, they are touchstones, reminders of who you are, who you were, and how you got that way.