Baking in the Sun

Today it will be 85 degrees and sunny in Connecticut.

My children went to school wearing shorts, and my hanging baskets of weeping petunias boast new fuchsia blooms.

Local fruit orchards are bursting with apples, peaches, pears, and plums, and it seems almost criminal not to retire to the kitchen and bake them into pies.

I had every intention of doing just that. Armed with overflowing bags of farm-fresh fruit, I planned to storm my kitchen with a paring knife and get to down to business. Oh, it wouldn't have been pretty with all the peelings and pits strewn about, but the aromas would have made up for all that.

Now that's one attractive pie.

My house would smell like a slice of warm apple pie. Or a bowl of peach cobbler with a big scoop of vanilla ice cream melting on the side. Or irresistibly sweet apple crisp.

Alas, fruit flies buzz around my ripening fruit like vultures circling the dead and dying. I've had to discard entire bowls of moldy peaches and plums, and the apples I proudly displayed on my kitchen table now bear curious little brown pock marks.

Oh autumn you tantalizing tease, for the sake of my fruit and prematurely carved pumpkins throughout the land, come back to us.

Until then, we'll be baking in the sun.