Sweet potato pie.  A southern tradition.  Something you have on Thanksgiving.  A pleasure I’ve always enjoyed.  A dessert that brings home to mind.  Not something you’d think would push a gal to tears.  But the Saturday after Thanksgiving it did just that.

It started with my stupid decision to waste time in that morning.  It was Saturday,  and I was looking forward to going to the home where the Americans were gathering and celebrating Thanksgiving.  It would be a fun time with people I enjoy and  from whom I learn much, and I had been looking forward to it for weeks.  But I didn’t go for my morning run and spent probably over an hour on my phone.  Not a good decision or best way to honor God with my time.

Still, I got up to start the sweet potatoes around 10, so I wasn’t that lazy. Then I discovered most of the sweet potatoes, a rare and expensive commodity here, had rotted.  How was I going to make a pie with only two normal sized potatoes and two small, skinny ones?  And they seemed so coarse and fibrous I wasn’t sure they’d make good pie.  But I wanted to make that pie!

So to remedy my lack of potatoes, I texted my friend from church to see if she knew if one of the markets had any. She called and found out they did, then she invited me over to cook at her place.  I was torn.  I wanted to bake the pie, but I also wasn’t ready for people so soon after so many people in the last few days.  But I know I am usually glad when I go be with people even when I’m tired, so I said yes to going over to her house.

I ate brunch, read my Bible, and wrote in my journal.  All the time my thoughts were spinning on how to best order the events that needed to happen to get all the ingredients.  I was still struggling with cooking at someone else’s house even though I am comfortable enough with my friend now that I don’t feel like I have to really be anything other than myself around her…though I do prefer not to be crying around people if I can help it – for everybody’s sake.  (Or is it just for my pride?)

That’s when the “comedy of errors” started happening.  But it was mostly errors and no comedy.  I miss-timed everything.

Earlier in the morning I had trouble finding a recipe that didn’t have evaporated milk in it because evaporated milk doesn’t exist here.  The other troublesome ingredient was brown sugar.  There is brown sugar here but usually only at one certain store which would require a taxi ride I didn’t have time for.  I don’t know why I didn’t plan ahead better.   Plan ahead?  Ha!  I was getting some humbling pay-back for being so annoyed with a culture that never seems to plan ahead.

After my morning devotions I went to the nearby store to get the remaining ingredients I needed for the cheese ball and happily also found brown sugar!  It wasn’t as fine and tasted more molasses-y than back home’s brown sugar, but it was brown sugar!

I made my family’s traditional cheese ball.  The cream cheese here is in small, individual serving-sized squares, so unwrapping 24 squares felt like it took forever.  Then I gathered everything I needed to take to my friend’s then couldn’t decide whether or not to go because I gasped after I looked at my watch.  I wasn’t going to have time take a taxi to my friend’s go to the store, cook the sweet potatoes, make the pie, and have time for it to bake.

I tried to hope for the best.  I was going to do as much as I could and hopefully let it bake while we were eating.  I got dressed, and read a text from my friend asking if I needed anything.  (By this time I was about 40 minutes behind schedule.)  I didn’t know what to do anymore.  So I did what I had been wanting to do all morning.  I laid sideways across my bed and cried.  Hard.

Tears of frustration at myself and the circumstances.  Tears of anger that I yet again didn’t do my best that morning.  Tears of homesickness; I wouldn’t even be trying to make this impossible pie if I were at home because I would be eating Mom’s!  Tears of sadness I had refused to let fall earlier that technical difficulties meant I didn’t get any pictures from my family’s Thanksgiving Day back in the states.  Tears of disappointment in myself that I couldn’t make up my mind about things as simple as where to cook a pie.  Tears that now I didn’t know if I had enough energy to be around people anymore.  Tears that something to which I had looked forward was now a bit dreaded.  Tears.  I had so many tears.

While there were many tears, they didn’t last for a long time.  I realized cooking at someone else’s house wasn’t going to work.  There. One decision down.  I wondered into the kitchen and stared at the ingredients on the counter, ready.  I looked at the cooked and pealed potatoes.  Maybe there was enough there for a pie.  And I could cook it at their house while we were eating.  There.  Another decision made.

I attempted my first every crust, and thankfully it wasn’t as hard as I was expecting.  I thought if I only did little mini pies in a muffin tin maybe the baking time would be less, but after I had one tin crusted, I realized I really didn’t want to try to manhandle two muffin tins and the cheese ball in a taxi, so I changed my mind, again, and crusted a glass pie dish.  Thankfully, there was enough crust left.  I double-wrapped it with plastic wrap and hoped I wouldn’t spill it, packed my bag, and took the elevator down stairs to catch a taxi.

I made it without spills only 5 minutes behind American time, early for Kurdish time.  I unpacked my bag and got the pie ready to go into the oven then joined others in the living room.  There I heard someone else’s frustration of trying to cook a green been casserole and having everything go wrong then not wanting to come to the gathering because of being so emotionally drained.  It was quite comforting knowing it isn’t just me who can get frustrated at these things!

I wish I could say the rest of my evening was perfectly happy, and I no longer struggled with tears, but that wouldn’t be accurate.  Don’t get me wrong.  I wasn’t miserable.  Most of the time I enjoyed myself holding babies, eating deliciousness, learning that my seat mate lived in my city back in the States, and we’d even gone skiing on the same mountain (we’re both still beginners, apparently), but there were occasions when I had to work hard to keep my voice from cracking and betraying all my emotions or when I decided simply to stand out on the balcony for a while. But in the end I left with a full stomach and an even fuller heart.

Sweet potato pie.  Not something you think would bring about an existential crisis but, two days after Thanksgiving, it did.  I’m still not sure what to think of it all.  The only lesson I can figure out is this: It was hard.  And it was good.  Oh, and the pie?  It wasn’t half-bad.

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P.S.  Time and writing and God has helped me find a new perspective on this day.  I now think when I think of that crazy day, I think of how God surrounded me with beautiful people.  The pie I couldn’t bake didn’t matter.  Yes, maybe that’s the point. God redeems hard things. Sometimes it just takes time.

P.P.S  I had sweet potato pie for breakfast the next day.  It’s a vegetable, so technically it’s healthy, right?

Here’s a recipe for Sweet Potato Pie in case you want to try it out yourself!

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