Aunt Peggy’s Apple Pie

Aunt Peggy really wasn’t my aunt; she was my mother’s first cousin, but she and my mother and aunts were very close. Aunt Peggy was the youngest of thirteen children, and at the height of the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal, one of her sisters-in-law died. The funeral was held in a church that my great-grandparents helped found. It should have been the site of great reverence and solemnity that day.

I sat in the back pew with my cousin, one of