Good-bye to my pumpkin pie

Yesterday, I ate mostly just pumpkin pie. In the morning, we bought the giant pumpkin pie Costco sells — the huge one — even while I knew our Thanksgiving dinner plans were pretty much done with. We arrived home, I snapped the plastic dome off the pie, cut a slice and stood at the kitchen counter and ate it standing up. That was my lunch.

“Are you eating pie?” Brent called out from the living room.

Then, a little later, before I headed to the church to make sandwiches for our Friday night thing, I had another slice for supper, a really big one. When I came home, later, I had another piece for an after-dinner dinner. “I am eating a lot of pie,” I said, at one point. I texted Holly to tell her that sometime this weekend I’d be dropping off what was left of a pumpkin pie for her and her roommates, to be nice, but also for some kind of accountability with this thing.

When we went to bed I moved the pie out to our strange porch/storage room where I keep the Elvis bust and a bunch of other stuff, and where it’s cool, because these pies don’t easily fit into the average fridge. This morning, I forgot about it, even though I had drifted off to sleep imagining it as breakfast, served with one of Brent’s americanos.

At lunch, after watching the pandemic news for pretty much the longest I have allowed myself to watch pandemic news since this long, bad dream began, I remembered the pie again, as a comfort, and went and brought it back into the kitchen.  That’s when I learned we have mice. Mice like pumpkin pie. They eat it around the cut edges with their tiny little mice mouth and I can only assume now that they walk all over it. I am mad at all mice.

In an hour or so, I will move my heart, with both of my arms and a lot of my strength toward a list of reasons to be thankful.