Cherry season
Jul. 14th, 2005 06:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kate_schaeferIt's cherry season in Washington. Two decades back, it wouldn't still be cherry season in mid-July. The season would have come and gone in mid-June, with a few expensive early cherries in early June and some expensive stragglers still available the first week of July, but the cherry growers have added earlier trees and later trees, slight variations on Bings and Vans and Lapins, and the cherry season now stretches to two months, or maybe a few days more than that.
Cherry season didn't exist in my childhood. The only cherries I knew were maraschino: bright red in thick sugar syrup. I loved them. I ate them in sundaes, which I had less often than once a year, or in an ice cream cone at Isely's during February, for George Washington, or taken from my mother's drink on a tiny plastic sword, or snitched from the jar in my grandmother's refrigerator door. There must have been fresh cherries available at fruit stands in Ohio when I was a kid, but the only fruits I remember getting at fruit stands were apples in fall and watermelon in summer.
We had cherry trees in our yard, tiny sour wild black cherries, not sweet cherries. My mother made jelly from them, two years. It was an immense amount of work for a small return, kids up the trees picking cherries for hours, my mother boiling and stirring and straining the cherries for hours more, heating and pouring the parafin on each glass. When we ate the jelly in the winter, it was good, but not as good as store-bought, not as smooth-textured or as sweet, and sometimes it spoiled under the parafin. Still, I was ready to pick the cherries again, and I was surprised that my mother didn't want to make wild black cherry jelly a third year.
My fresh cherry memories start a few years after I moved here, in my twenties. My housemate on Queen Anne Hill came home one day with a whole box of cherries. She'd spent an immense amount of money, or a remarkably small amount of money, I can't remember which, and bought maybe twelve pounds of cherries. Enough to make myself sick and have some left over, she said, and our whole household sat down and ate nothing but cherries for dinner that night.
Since then, I've bought cherries when I could, at the Pike Place Market, at the University District Saturday market, from the back of a truck near the Burke-Gilman bike trail, at roadside stands on the road to Yakima. As a sophisticated intellectual, I learned to scorn the Bing cherry and prefer the subtlety of the Rainier. Later, my tastebuds overruled my intellect, and I returned to the intensity of the Bing, though now the wrinkly black Chelan is my favorite.
Last year, the farmer we usually patronize had no cherries. None. I forget whether it was a rainstorm or a hailstorm; I know the previous year there was a hailstorm which wiped out most of the farmers except our usual one. They were philosophical about it, as they'd been humble about their good luck the year before. They said, as they always do, that farmers don't need to go to Las Vegas to gamble.
Early in this cherry season, I sat at my dining room table and ate cherries for hours with an old friend as we talked about our youth. We didn't exactly tell stories; we asked questions we should have asked then, and arrived at understandings it would have been helpful to have thirty years ago. Years from now, cherries will taste of those conversations, and of my housemates on Queen Anne, and of the philosophical farmers.
Good thing the fruit's flavor is already complex and rich, to carry all that weight.
Cherry season didn't exist in my childhood. The only cherries I knew were maraschino: bright red in thick sugar syrup. I loved them. I ate them in sundaes, which I had less often than once a year, or in an ice cream cone at Isely's during February, for George Washington, or taken from my mother's drink on a tiny plastic sword, or snitched from the jar in my grandmother's refrigerator door. There must have been fresh cherries available at fruit stands in Ohio when I was a kid, but the only fruits I remember getting at fruit stands were apples in fall and watermelon in summer.
We had cherry trees in our yard, tiny sour wild black cherries, not sweet cherries. My mother made jelly from them, two years. It was an immense amount of work for a small return, kids up the trees picking cherries for hours, my mother boiling and stirring and straining the cherries for hours more, heating and pouring the parafin on each glass. When we ate the jelly in the winter, it was good, but not as good as store-bought, not as smooth-textured or as sweet, and sometimes it spoiled under the parafin. Still, I was ready to pick the cherries again, and I was surprised that my mother didn't want to make wild black cherry jelly a third year.
My fresh cherry memories start a few years after I moved here, in my twenties. My housemate on Queen Anne Hill came home one day with a whole box of cherries. She'd spent an immense amount of money, or a remarkably small amount of money, I can't remember which, and bought maybe twelve pounds of cherries. Enough to make myself sick and have some left over, she said, and our whole household sat down and ate nothing but cherries for dinner that night.
Since then, I've bought cherries when I could, at the Pike Place Market, at the University District Saturday market, from the back of a truck near the Burke-Gilman bike trail, at roadside stands on the road to Yakima. As a sophisticated intellectual, I learned to scorn the Bing cherry and prefer the subtlety of the Rainier. Later, my tastebuds overruled my intellect, and I returned to the intensity of the Bing, though now the wrinkly black Chelan is my favorite.
Last year, the farmer we usually patronize had no cherries. None. I forget whether it was a rainstorm or a hailstorm; I know the previous year there was a hailstorm which wiped out most of the farmers except our usual one. They were philosophical about it, as they'd been humble about their good luck the year before. They said, as they always do, that farmers don't need to go to Las Vegas to gamble.
Early in this cherry season, I sat at my dining room table and ate cherries for hours with an old friend as we talked about our youth. We didn't exactly tell stories; we asked questions we should have asked then, and arrived at understandings it would have been helpful to have thirty years ago. Years from now, cherries will taste of those conversations, and of my housemates on Queen Anne, and of the philosophical farmers.
Good thing the fruit's flavor is already complex and rich, to carry all that weight.
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Date: 2005-07-14 09:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-14 10:44 pm (UTC)