TEDxSalem

Accord­ing to Vick­ie Hardin Woods, “if you’re going to give a gift, [a pie] is about the right gift.”

“If you give some­thing that is too valu­able, then the per­son feels oblig­ed to give some­thing back,” she said. “But you also want it to have enough effort and val­ue” to show that you care.

Two years ago Woods was inspired to per­fect the gift of giv­ing, one day at a time, with a lit­tle help from her oven. Over the course of a 365-day peri­od, begin­ning with a lemon meringue, she baked one fresh pie each day from scratch and deliv­ered it, unso­licit­ed, to friends, neigh­bors and even­tu­al­ly even com­plete strangers. She gained noto­ri­ety in local news by pho­tograph­ing each pie and its smil­ing, occa­sion­al­ly dis­ori­ent­ed recip­i­ent as part of her blog.

For her TEDx talk, Woods will dis­cuss how sur­pris­ing peo­ple with pie gave her both a deep­er under­stand­ing of com­mu­ni­ty, and insight into her own sense of pur­pose after retir­ing from a 30-year career in local gov­ern­ment.

A pie-a-day blog – Seems daunt­ing, but is it real­ly? Here are some key ingre­di­ents, and tips to make yours a smash hit at your next ran­dom encounter…

What you would need:

• (137) dif­fer­ent pie recipes
• Fresh, local, whole­some organ­ic ingre­di­ents
• A Tum­blr blog
• Be retired
• Option­al: (5) grand­chil­dren to occa­sion­al­ly help deliv­er pies.

Break the ice. “That was on many days the hard­est thing I had to do,” she said, “to find some­body, and then approach them and give them the pie.” It’s impor­tant to estab­lish a con­nec­tion, even if it’s brief, she said.

“You can’t just walk up to a stranger and say, ‘Here’s a pie.’ You have to build some sort of rela­tion­ship, no mat­ter how short it is.”

Some were more recep­tive than oth­ers, she said. Some­times small talk would not be enough for a skep­ti­cal stranger; more often than not, though, Woods’ pie pitch would find a will­ing par­tic­i­pant.

“There’s some­thing about break­ing through that bar­ri­er,” she said. “I don’t know how many times I had peo­ple say to me, ‘This is the best thing that’s hap­pened to me today!”

Fail­ures hap­pen. “Usu­al­ly if [a pie] didn’t turn out, I fig­ured it was me, not the pie,” Woods said. She remem­bered a par­tic­u­lar pecan pie she tried to show off at a cook­ing class she was tak­ing at Carl’s Cui­sine on Chemeke­ta St. In a hur­ry, she had failed to give the pie enough time to set. “I opened up the car­ri­er and there’s this gooey mess all over the bot­tom.”

Blend until ingre­di­ents come togeth­er. Woods sees pie giv­ing as “less as grat­i­tude than just a gift, free of all encum­brances, grace,” she said. It took rough­ly a month to work up the nerve to approach her first stranger, she said. But the reward of mak­ing peo­ple hap­py made the chal­lenge worth­while for her.

“I got the sat­is­fac­tion of know­ing that I touched someone’s life,” she said.

For Woods, pie pro­vid­ed struc­ture to a life in tran­si­tion. It forced her to get out into the world. And in hand­ing home-baked good­ness to peo­ple some­times far from their home, she brought the world a lit­tle clos­er to hers.

“Each pie is its own jour­ney,” she said, from her kitchen to points unknown, and the sto­ries told and expe­ri­enced in between.

“That’s what life is about, our sto­ries.”

 

– To see Vick­ie Hardin Woods and oth­er TEDx Salem 2015 speak­ers, get your tick­ets here.