When Vickie Hardin Woods retired, she knew she needed a plan. “I was worried about losing my carefully crafted identity as a professional. I was looking for something to carry me through that time … What else can I be?”
She decided to do – rather than be – something new. Hardin Woods would bake a pie every day for a year, using fresh ingredients local to her home in Salem, Oregon – and she would give each pie away.
“I knew it would make me reach out every day to somebody, so I wouldn’t be isolated in my house. And it gave me a routine,” she says. Hardin Woods was 61. The year before, she had been diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment. “I was trying to show myself that I could still think and be creative,” she says.
Hardin Woods made a list of would-be recipients, and on the first day of her retirement flew to California to stay with her brother.
She baked her first pie, a lemon meringue, in his kitchen, and gave it to her 88-year-old aunt, Carolyn. As a teenager, Hardin Woods had moved in with her aunt and uncle when her mother became ill. “They gave me stability,” she says. “I really learned what a family was there … It was the perfect first pie.”
The next day Hardin Woods made a peach pie, which she gave to a high-school friend. After that came a chocolate cream pie for her niece, who had just had twins. “I’m not sure I really understood what I was getting into,” she says. Former colleagues, baristas, grocery clerks, strangers in the street … One day, she gave a pie to a homeless man who was sitting in front of the mall. He shared it with his friends.
Sometimes the pie’s recipient would say: “How did you know I needed this today?” Or: “Nobody’s ever given me anything before!” She found those moments heartwarming. As word of her project and blog spread around Salem, she got known as “the pie lady”.
For more than 30 years, Hardin Woods had worked as a city planner, climbing the ranks to become head of department. “I’m a planner by nature, training and profession. So it’s part of who I am,” she says.
View image in fullscreen Hardin Woods outside her home in Salem, Oregon. Photograph: Celeste Noche/The Guardian
She knew it as soon as she went to college. “The minute I heard about land-use planning, I thought: ‘That’s it!’ What I really liked about it was that planning takes time, chaos, many different components, puts them all together and makes them into something manageable.”
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