The Pumpkin Pie Dance

My offering for your Thanksgiving reading pleasure.

13 years ago I was asked to make 40 pumpkin pies for a church dinner; yes 40, I double checked my memory of the facts of this story.  I baked and baked and baked and on the second day I woke up to find that my darling little children had gotten into several of them and I had to re-bake about 15 of the pies.  Sigh.

I ran out of storage space right quick and asked my Aunt Sheri, who is a year and a week older than I am, if I could borrow some space in her empty freezer to which she agreed.  She lived about 2 or 3 blocks from me in her lovely new home with beautiful new carpets and sparkly clean walls and floors.

Pete and I loaded up two trays full of pies and drove carefully to her house.  I got out and got my tray with 6 or 7 freshly baked, yummy, pumpkin custard pies and headed into the house while Pete got his tray of 6 or 7 freshly baked, yummy, pumpkin custard pies.  Sheri opened the door for me and I entered her pristine tile entryway next to her formal living room with the deep green plush carpet (guess what happens next?)  Nothing happened.  Not a thing.  But suddenly and for no reason whatsoever my entire tray of pies just flew into the air.  Not dropped.  Not slid off the tray.  No. They flew.  In the air.  Sheri caught one pie about halfway to the floor and smashed it sideways into her chest, a couple of them bounced off of me on their way to her floor and in the space of half a second the reality set in.  We looked at each other in sheer horror and just had time to see the final crumbs settle onto the amber colored mush when Pete walked up to the glass storm door with his tray.

I picked my way over to him and opened the door and was desperately trying to think of something, anything to possibly say to her and also thinking about how many, many pies I was actually baking for this stupid dinner, and Pete walked through the door with his intact tray of pies.

Before he could even ask what had happened his tray suddenly flipped out of his hands and his entire tray of pies literally flew into the air.  They flipped end over end and didn't have as far to drop because of the previous piles of  pumpkin pie that had plopped.  We all three stood there for one beat and...burst into hysterical laughter.

What else can you do?  Truly the most bizarre and the funniest thing that EVER happened to me.