She made four separate piles of these apples in front of her, with each pile
containing more than a hundred apples. Using a pallet of colored sugar-paste and a paintbrush, she applied a thin layer of color on three piles of apples. One pile was made green, one was made greenish-pink, another bright red. The last pile she gathered into the center of her counter-space and took a step toward the Divine. She began the delicate process of attaching gold leaf to the apples, pressing gently so that the slivers of gold would stick without shredding. She polished them with a small piece of cotton and the golden apples glowed. My first thought was that if the Tree of Knowledge apples looked like anything, they looked like these apples. They were little tokens of truth from a creator for a creator.
As she finished her last golden apple, a firm woman in her fifties wearing a dark brown collared shirt and a navy blue shin-length skirt entered from the back of the bakery and smiled at me as I watched the baker. Another woman walked in from the street and conversed with the lady behind the counter, their words creating lyrical background music like an operatic rhapsody, and giggles that escaped from the customer’s two little girls clinging to each of her thighs tickled my bellybutton.
Overwhelmed by a feeling of connection to all mothers, to all females that
transmuted time into one long ribbon of marzipan, I got a little emotional. A few tears dropped quietly for all the mothers before me who were responsible for our generations. All those silent contributors to the foundation of what is the modern world ascended through the cobblestone, exhaled from the bakery, and swallowed me. I felt reverence for my place in the world. I felt reverence for my gender. Gazing at the apples, I first thought how mothers are much like the baker. We take care in how we shape and mold each apple, we recognize each apple is individual, and each one will eventually leave the shop, for admiration or digestion, whichever the case, we have to let them go.
But then I was struck by something else as I gazed at the apples. The colored ones were like man and the golden apples were like woman. The glistening gold apples were perfectly individual, beautiful in their softened shape, malleable. The other apples of red, greenish-pink, and green were rough, dense, and identical in shape and texture. I watched as the woman behind the counter excused herself from the conversation she was having with the mother of two and removed a white porcelain display plate from a glass cabinet.