Below the pear tree: writing about home

At the bottom of a tall steep hill too high for anyone but children to want to climb, my cottage stone house sits on a windy street. At the top of the hill above the windy street, walnut trees and a pear tree grow at jaunty angles. All summer long, the fruits and nuts drop from the trees and roll down the hills. Squirrels and bees and birds clamber all over the hills to eat the feast scattered on the ground. In the summer, the smell of sweet fermenting pears fills the whole yard.

We don’t eat the fruit and nuts. Walnut trees have a tangy odor that clings to your hands when you touch them, so picking nuts from the trees is unpleasant. When the nuts fall to the ground, the squirrels get to them well before the residents of the little cottage house, and only bits and pieces are left.

Many many years ago, before we moved into the little cottage house, the pear tree had thick vines of poison ivy growing all over the trunk and branches. My daddy used an axe to chop through the vines and sprayed the roots with poison to kill the ivy. “Just in case,” Daddy said, “we can’t eat the pears just in case the poison got into the roots of the tree and into the fruit.” Instead we feed the birds and the bees that visit our yard and feast on the sun-warmed sticky fruit.

Three tall Kentucky coffee bean trees grow on the hill, leaning over so dangerous and low. Whole fronds of branches fall from the trees when the winds blow high and we use the branches to make little pretend huts. When the seed pods fall, full of brown hard pebbles like roasted coffee beans, we imagine that they are food in our little pretend huts.

The hill, so high, makes homes for so many little creatures. We have cardinals and chipmunks and rabbits and robins and moles and even garter snakes. The chipmunks are my favorite; I love their stripes and spots.

But each year the summer has to end. No more swings on the swing set, no more skin the cat on the jungle gym, no more pears and coffee pods and make believe houses. Each year is back to school, where we wait for the fragrant orange blossoms and the forsythia on the bushes to tell us soon will be time for pears again.