THE OLD SAYING holds that we should make lemonade when life deals us lemons. My mother is so adept at that she makes lemon meringue pies out of lemons. She’s unflappable. No matter what happens, she just keeps plugging away. She’s fond of shrugging her shoulders and saying or thinking “oh, well.”

It’s important to be able to do that, and it’s a real art. Most of us tend not to let go of disappointment or trouble, and we lug it around with us. Mama has a way of not letting that happen. She’d tell you it’s her relationship with the Lord.

Mama’s been making those lemon meringue pies out of lemons — both real and figuratively — for a long, long time, and I can confirm she’s still making them. She made me one a while back. Nobody makes a lemon meringue pie like Mama, and I’m not just saying that because she’s my mother. It starts with her crust, which she makes from scratch. I don’t know why it’s better than any other pie crust, but it is.

When we were growing up in East Texas back in the 1950s and 1960s, Mama always made the Sunday dessert on Saturday night, and it was going to be either pies or cake. If it was pies, that meant making the crust, the filling, and the meringue. The kids would get involved and get in the way, and we’d lick the utensils, pots and pans.

We would get the scraps from the pie crust and make our own treat. We’d put he strips of excess pie dough on a platter, sprinkle cinnamon and sugar on it, and stick it under the broiler of the oven until it was done. That made a yummy treat that we shared.

If the filling was lemon, then lemons had to be squeezed. We had this old-time hand-held lemon squeezer, and for some reason we kids got a big kick out of squeezing the lemons and pouring up the juice that yielded. Mama would use the lemon juice to flavor the filling she was making on the stove top. I can remember her standing there as the filling cooked, working it with that wooden spoon, making it right at the right moment in time.

AFTER MAMA would prepare the filling and had baked the pie crust, she would pour the lemon filling into the freshly cooked crust, and smooth it out. That would leave a big wooden spoon and a pan with some filling in it, and the kids would all descend on those. That was good licking, that freshly cooked lemon pie filling.

Last came the meringue. That was made mainly with egg whites. In the early days we used the manual mixer, run by hand, but later Mama got an electric mixer, and she’d use that to whip up the meringue. We would lick the mixer pieces and the meringue bowl, but there wasn’t a lot there to be licked.

The memory of mother preparing Sunday’s dessert on Saturday night, the ritual of the kids clamoring about for the extra pieces, and getting a taste of the dessert we would enjoy the next day — these are the things that make a life worth living. They are the memories of that family when you were a kid, when “family” meant that group of people. When you’re a kid you think that’s family for all time, but as you grow up, you discover life gets a lot more complicated than mom, dad and siblings.

When life deals us lemons, we can make lemonade. But if we want to be like my very healthy 81-year-old mother, we learn to make lemon meringue pies of the lemons life sends us. We decide if the experience becomes sour or sweet.

© 2009, Jim “Pappy” Moore, All Rights Reserved.

Jim “Pappy” Moore is a native son of East Texas who still makes the piney woods his home. oaktreefm58@hotmail.com