The last thing my mother made for me was an apple spice cake. She always took pride in it because of the expansive apple tree that was the luminary of our backyard. It has always been the most beautiful thing about our house. The branches reaching for the sky, leaves and breath filling my own lungs, its fruit filling my stomach, and its blossoms filling my mind. The tree was our witness, our sanctuary. I can’t count the number of secrets I’ve whispered into its trunk or the promises I’ve carved there. The tree was probably older than our house itself. My mother told me it’s the main reason that she decided to live in the house.
“You’ll never grow hungry as long as you have the fruits of the earth,” she told me when I was very young. We were outside, her back against the trunk while I laid in her lap, facing up towards the branches, watching the way they danced in the wind. If I reached down to the ground I swore I could feel the roots shifting, wiggling in the dirt. And if I looked close enough, I could watch the trunk swell and compress with every breath, the air flowing from it straight into my lungs- calming me but also giving me life.
Maybe she was onto something, because the tree never stopped giving fruit. Whether in the rains of April, or the snow of December, or the great winds of March, she was prosperous, ruby red apples continued to grow and drop from its branches. The animals knew it too, squirrels and cautious deer, and raccoons and foxes, and birds– they all came to feast on the apples littering the ground. Even the apples that would go uneaten, instead of the impermeable smell of rot, a barely sweet fragrance would emit, feeding the worms and insects of the ground. Sometimes I too would enjoy an apple, sitting outside among the woodland creatures, shaded by the canopy. My mother liked to leave the fruit for the animals, knowing they needed it much more than we did.
But every now and then, my mother would pick a basket of apples and carry it to the kitchen, carefully wash and peel them, slice and saute them with brown sugar and cinnamon until they were soft and flavorful, and tenderly fold them into a spiced batter and popped it in the oven at 375 degrees Fahrenheit.
I always loved when my mother would bake it. The sweet and spicy fragrance would fill our home, warming my soul and calling the animals outside to it. I could swear that the birds would sit right on the kitchen windowsill to bask in the aroma, as their songs would always seem louder when my mother baked her famous cake, almost as if they also rejoiced in the fact that we too were enjoying fruit from the tree.
Now the birds don’t sing as I pull the frozen cake out of the freezer, the lack of birdsong haunting me as much as the silence in the empty house. The frozen cake is a gross mockery of a fresh one, one that’s soft and aromatic, and that spreads its warmth from the center of its fluffy layers to my own core. This cake isn’t one that I’d sneak slices of under the dark blankets of night, just because I had dreamt of it. Just before her sudden passing, my mother had made this last cake. I have no idea how she managed to make it. Maybe something had called her to do it, whispered in her ear in the throes of her final moments of life to make the cake. The cake sits on the marble countertop, only having been placed there after the funeral reception had cleared out. I muse at the fact that my mother could have left me her old wedding ring, or some old secret family heirloom, but the last thing she had gifted me was this house, the old apple tree, and one last spiced apple cake.
I sit and watch the cake thaw, the ice chipping away from the saran it’s wrapped in, condensation dripping down the plastic. I don’t know how many hours I sit there, as the sun rises and falls, the winter chill seeping through the panes of glass. Not once do I tire, even as the sun peeks out from the horizon once more and the cake is no longer frozen, now soft to the touch. I carefully unravel the saran wrap, wistful of the icing that is captured and pulled off the cake.
I take a slice and plop it on a plate, carrying it in one hand. In the other, I balance the rest of the entire cake all the way outside to the sprawling tree. She is glorious, a sight to behold even as the world around her freezes away, as I freeze away too. I sit on the ground, in the ring devoid of snow right beneath the still blossoming tree, gently depositing the whole cake. I sit silently, picking pieces of cake with my fingertips carrying it to my tongue, where somehow, the spices and sweetness still explode on my tastebuds. With every bite the trunk breathes in and out, in and out, letting me know that she’s here with me too. Before I know it my tears mix with the crumbs and the piece is gone.
When I get up, I leave the cake for the animals, for the tree itself, for my mother.
Writer | Mackenzie Dunson ’25 | mdunson25@amherst.edu
Editor | Olivia Tennant ’27 | otennant27@amherst.edu