Smile! Janet’s Cooking: Deborah McGrath’s mom’s cherry pie

While writing my column about my mom last month , I wanted to see inside her old home and meet the person responsible for all the beauty that surrounds it today.

But having no idea who that might be, I was left to appear at 130 North Prairie St. in Batavia , uninvited. My husband, Jerry, came with me.

We walked down a narrow path, adorned in coneflowers and black-eyed Susans, up the porch steps, to the front door. A painter was on a ladder alongside the house.

I rang the doorbell, but no one came. I pressed it again, still no response. I peered in the beveled window where the stars had hung all those years ago.

The painter on the ladder said, “I think Deborah is around back.”

“Oh good, thank you!”

“Let’s go look,” said Jerry.

We stepped into a backyard nirvana of towering phlox,