The lunchtime bustle in the Shipley family kitchen rivaled a busy night on the cook line at l'Etre Suprême, but it was a hell of a lot cheerier.

The kitchen in the house where I’d grown up could not have been more different—it had been like a large, sparkling tomb. I’d never been allowed to cook anything in it, or disrupt its perfect order. Since my mother had been busy climbing the corporate ladder, she’d played host to guests all the time. But she didn’t cook. We’d had a full-time personal chef who made me feel like an intruder if I wandered in there looking for a snack.

I hadn’t started cooking until college, when I finally got free of that stifling place. My freshman year I had a rented house with a couple of girls I knew from high school. One of them was a great cook already, and I learned a lot at her elbow. In fact, I’d liked everything about that first year at BU except for the schoolwork. I’d liked our house, my friends, the sorority I rushed, and partying. If I’d spent fewer hours learning to make dumplings from scratch and more hours doing homework, I might have gotten B’s instead of D’s.

But I hadn’t.

Water under the bridge.

Drifting into the dining room, I watched Daphne speed-set the table for ten people. “During picking season we hold lunch outdoors, because we’re twenty people then,” she told me.

May Shipley rushed by with a tray of coffee cups and a water carafe.

“How can I help?” I asked her for the third time, following her back into the kitchen. “There must be something.”

“You are so sweet, but we’ve got this down to a science. We serve a whole lot of food in this kitchen.”

“I can see that.” It seemed categorically impossible that there wasn’t something I could do to help, but if she didn’t want to assign me a task, that left me free to admire the farmhouse kitchen. The house had to be over a hundred years old, but it had been lovingly handled. The giant butcher’s block table in the center of the kitchen looked as if it had been there since the dawn of time—there were scars and scratches in its oiled surface. But that only made it more beautiful to me.

What I’d wished for as a child was exactly this—a storybook family on a farm somewhere, crammed around the table, a rope swing on an old tree, lacy curtains blowing in the breeze…

Someone had abandoned a small bowl of cherries in the center of the table, half of them pitted. They gleamed like perfect red jewels. “Hey—these are gorgeous. Are they sour cherries?” I lifted the bowl up to my nose for a sniff—occupational hazard of being a chef. Wow. Nothing else had the same rich scent as a cherry.

“Yes they are, and they’re terrific in pies,” Mrs. Shipley said, lifting slice after slice of brisket onto a platter. “But we won’t get enough for a pie until next week. I never know what to do with the first few—it’s not enough to make anything. I tossed them into a batch of strawberry jam last year.”