starting september

The weather turns cool and I'm making applesauce. My neighbor has been gifting me all of her delicious, albeit wormy, apples and I have been churning out the sauce. Nothing like it. I swear it is best - the only applesauce my boys will eat.

Cutting out the wormy bits takes a while, as does mashing the cooked apples through the sieve. So, at night especially, I've been using the time to listen to podcasts of This American Life. One that has stuck with me all week is Break-Up. Act Two of this program replays an interview from 1987 with an eight-year-old girl who is trying to understand why her parents are getting divorced. She wrote a letter to then New York Mayor Ed Koch as well as to a children's author who wrote a book about divorce, but she doesn't get any answers that help. I was so touched by this piece. Her sadness, her confusion, her bluntness.

Maybe it's partly the inherent nostalgia of the season - buying school supplies, pulling out the sweaters and the blankets, making my grandma's applesauce - but there is something in that little girl's voice that yanked me back. Yet, rather than make me feel sad, the piece made me feel strangely grateful. See, at the end of the interview, NPR's Noah Adams rather awkwardly tells the girl that the good news is she'll be okay in the end. And, as dumb as it sounds to say to an eight year old, on a cool, beautiful, sunny first of September, making applesauce in my kitchen while my three guys play in the backyard, this 41 year old knows that he's right.