So I knocked, with my non-pie holding, cmc-joint braced hand, and Laverne opened the door. She was in a winter coat. I noticed the house had two window AC units, so briefly I wondered if it were drafty or maybe she wasn’t using the heat.

“What’s your position on holiday pie?” I asked her. She smiled and sputtered a bit, so I explained we were from two doors down. She asked my name, then asked if I knew hers, which I didn’t. It’s laverne B, and she is sharp. She asked why she had earned this special pie honor, and I explained that I’d noticed her husband was no longer with us, and we were just thinking about her. As it happens, she was waiting for a ride from a family member to celebrate Christmas with her daughter’s family in a nearby town, so the pie would come in handy. Her husband, she said, had beck surgery, then couldn’t swallow and simply faded away.

“I think he just gave up,” she said, not accusingly, but compassionately. “He had nothing left, really to stay for.”

Laverne and her husband moved here, it happens, the year after I was born, along with their neighbors. Since both men served in Europe in WWII (the surviving neighbor on a B-17, he told me (along with the facts that married an English girl and he now strolls the neighborhood in adult diapers) I presume that’s where they met and started their post-war families together, here in this neighborhood.

There’s no profound end to this story. It’s just a story of a pie changing hands.

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