Yes, in my garden menagerie inherited from previous owners are also a couple of pear trees.  I am really frustrated right now because I need one of those picking poles (don’t knopw what else to call them).  At the tippy top of the trees are the best pears.  And I am in a race with birds and bugs to get to them…probably squirrels too.

One summer when I was growing up and I went to Strasbourg, I will never forget the visit to a pear orchard.  There pears were growing into bottles placed at the ends of limbs when the pears were teeny-weeny.  These pears later became an eau du vie Poire William.

Also, my parents had a friend when I was growing up named Harry Niblock.  He was an  artist (he passed away a few years ago) and he loved to paint and draw pears.   Of course the amusing thing about Harry’s pears is they almost reminded you of people when he was finished.  Some (like at left)  were more traditional still lives.  But some of those pears? Odd to say but they were downright sexual in nature.

His ex-wife Margery Niblock is also an artist.  She taught me how to do woodblock and linoleum cutting and printing. I still have the scar on my wrist from when she warned me how to hold my tools when cutting and I did not listen. The mini photo of a woodcut of geraniums is one of her pieces that I actually have – found it at a flea market and it took me back to when I was a kid.  To this day, she is still one of my favorite artists.  If I see her work anywhere, I buy it.  One time when we were little, she used my sister as a model.  My sister was a little thing sitting on the beach playing with my mother’s wide brimmed straw hat and playing in the sand.  And during the holidays, Margie would also create these fabulous Christmas-y wood cuts.

So I thought of both of them today as I was trying to get a few pears down to photograph and this is the result.

Like I said, it’s a pear thing.  And a memory.