The Yellow House

Happy equinox. (Photo from our woods, this morning.)

“Welcome to my office,” Ben says as we climb out of the car. Neat rows of pear trees stretch their limbs out of the morning mist. It’s kind of obnoxious, actually—does he have to brag?—when you consider that my “office” is a cube with padded, circa-1981 salmon pink walls. Ben, by contrast, makes his living here:We grab a ladder and start picking. The crew has been through here once already and most of the harvest is in—they’ll use it to make pear wine, which they then send to a local distillery to make pear brandy—but there are some stragglers. These get sold in the tasting room. We get to take home the “ugly” pears, the ones with spots or lumps or hard patches where they were damaged by insects. For the next couple weeks, bins of the fruit take up residence in our house, and I start thinking of pear pie and pear bread and pear butter. » Click to read more

I am back from Kenya, and things are in full harvest swing here. Ben works long days, every day of the week, and I take a million gratuitous pictures of grapes. (If this sounds familiar, it’s because I did it last year.)Ben manages a pear orchard, too, and they harvested those while I was gone (pear brandy in a few months, anyone?) I’ve been stockpiling lots of pear baked goods and want to share a recipe with you next week for one of those. Until then!