Meringue.  It fills me with dread.  It riddles me with anxiety.  It deflates my confidence.

Egg whites and sugar.  A dash of cream of tartar to act as a stabilizer.  Three simple ingredients, heart palpitations and a lump in my throat.

Beat the whites with the cream of tartar.  Pour in the sugar, slowly.  Wait for them—those glossy peaks that almost but not fully hold their shape.  They should be flexible, not stiff.  With only a slight curve in their peaks, they shouldn’t flop over.  The texture, feathery and cloud-like, but not like the clouds that seem to protrude out of the sky, singular and distinct, like images from a children’s pop-up book.  But rather those that mingle with each other, awash with the blue of the sky, visibly defined yet without a clear beginning or end.

This is the meringue of lemon meringue pies.  And it would seem that there is just one single moment—a flash of a millisecond perceived only by the talented and trained eye—at which point the three simple ingredients come together to form this desirable union.

Three months and numerous pies later this moment continues to elude me.  Did I look away, distracted, precisely at that moment?  Or was I mesmerized by the whir of the mixer and the blur of the whisk?  It’s always too late when I finally realize the peaks are too soft or too rigid—the meringue is either on the pie or I’ve simply gone past the point of no return. Determination turns to dejection.  Trounced again by meringue.

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Today just isn’t my day.  Truth be told, it hasn’t really been my week. Perhaps I might blame it on the transition that’s before us—that between summer and fall.  But so far it’s only brought the return of good things I’d forgotten I missed, like scarves, Mutsu apples at the Farmer’s Market and rainy days that force you to take the time to curl up on the couch with a good book, leaving your to-do list(s) to wait another day.

But there have been other transitions that have coincided with the changing of the seasons that have made life more tumultuous than usual.  I’ve recently started a new job at another local bakery.  I’ve left behind long nights baking bread for early mornings making scones. Despite my passion for bread baking, I learned rather quickly that I was simply unwilling to conform to the life of a night labourer.  It’s not that I couldn’t handle the twelve, sometimes thirteen-hour shifts.  It’s not that I couldn’t adjust to my morning starting at 8pm and my evenings beginning at 8am.  It’s that I forbade myself to sleep when the sun was shining, dragging my weary body out of bed to stroll the market, to sip espresso on café patios in the declining summer sun and to share stories and conversations while nursing cool beer on warm evenings. Needless to say, the change was desired, if not needed.

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