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.

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.”

She had to wait to start college. In 1970, at 18, she became a mother after falling in love with a man who deserted the military during the Vietnam war. He was later arrested, and was in prison when their baby was born.

“It was a very traumatic year,” she says. But she took the view that “I put myself in that position. It was me making those choices. So I knew I had to follow through on them.” Besides, she wanted to become a parent and “really enjoyed having children”. Now 74, Hardin Woods has taught her three grandchildren to bake pies.

“My personal life has been kind of chaotic until the last 30 years,” she says, roughly the length of time she has been married to her third husband, Bob.

In the same way that planning appealed to her as an answer to chaos, maybe, she says, the same is true for baking pies. “You take a bunch of ingredients and you create something out of them.”

Twelve years on from her year of baking and giving, Hardin Woods has continued to invent new projects, including writing a letter a day, and painting pictures of her local sky. She won a Best of Show prize at the state fair for a brown butter hazelnut number and is writing a book about the pie experience.

But she has learned so much more than how to bake pies. “What really came out of it was the understanding that I was someone who could do new things. And my professional identity wasn’t critical to who I am,” she says.

Even now, “After I have an encounter with somebody, I think: ‘There’s a person I wish I could give a pie to.’”