“Comfort Me With Apples”
– Song of Solomon 2:5
I’ve been working on a memoir for three years. It’s a mess, a woolly mammoth of pages. Some of them are good — selections have been published — but none of it hangs together. If you ask me to show you Chapter One, I can’t. If you ask me to state my MDQ (main dramatic question), I can’t. If you ask me to name a time frame, I can’t. My memoir manuscript, like the beast it is, belongs in a zoo.
Last night I decided to use my air fryer as a dehydrator. My daughter is visiting, and we’re going air fryer crazy. I took a bunch of bad apples — I’m as much a perfectionist about apples as I am about writing — and sliced them. Because I hate to throw out anything I’ve paid for, I Googled “How do you use the air fryer to dehydrate apples?” Google wrote back: “Slice apples evenly, place in air fryer for eight hours at 135 degrees.” Eight hours? Wow. OK. I cut the apples unevenly, because I’m careless and don’t follow directions, and put them in the air fryer. I hit the dehydrate button, which even my low-end, cheap-as-they-come air fryer miraculously features. The air fryer automatically flashed “8 hours” and “135°.” Unity, agreement, an entire universe in compliance. How rare is that? Since the air fryer turns off by itself, I knew I could go up to bed and in the morning, wake up to a basket of repurposed, dehydrated apples.
I woke at 4 am. I can’t sleep these days because of the above memoir. Can’t write it. I can write around it, beside it, on top of it, underneath it. I just can’t write it. What did I do? I wandered downstairs and took a few crystals (don’t get excited) of powdered melatonin. Against all advice, I took this sleep remedy at 4 am. Wandering about the kitchen at 4:30 am, I heard the air fryer beep three times. It was telling me the dehydrator had completed its cycle. I opened the air fryer drawer. The apples were, as promised, dehydrated. I went upstairs, not sleepily, but happily. Why? Because some things work. My memoir may be hibernating in the zoo, but I can dehydrate apples. Back in my bed, the crystals dissolving on my tongue, I fell asleep.
When she is not fooling around with her air fryer, Fran Schumer is writing. A poet, author, and journalist, she lives year-round with her husband in Oak Bluffs.
