The lessons of picking cherries
are ephemeral because backyard cherry trees
don’t have professional care, grow as many
of us do, like weeds, lucky to find nourishment.
Frost randomly kills besides: two years
have passed since the last crop
twinkled candy apple red in the sun.
Backyard cherry tree
Only once I’m on the ladder,
half-hidden among the deep green leaves,
do I remember the thrill of barefoot tree-climbing,
sure-footed along thick mossy branches,
gazing down on my Floridian domain—and sit
on the top rung a moment to savor the past.
As I harvest cherries it comes back to me,
the know-how that only surfaces when we’ve put
our hands to the work—the way carmine
deceives, the shadow side still pale yellow;
how to tell red from red, how to recognize
the crimson that means ripeness.
At first my progress is slow for it takes practice
to resurrect skill. By day three I pick swiftly,
rarely let the ripest and best slip through my fingers
to fall, a small perfection lost.
In the kitchen I discard those already turning dark,
leaves and stems, a tiny bug or two—this is nature after all.
Facing the pitting sends a ripple of despair through me.
They are many. I picked so many, unable to stop myself.
Just this branch, this bunch more, denying the labor
I was piling up, the finishing that matters most.
With the right music and a tall cold glass beside me,
a rhythm establishes itself as it sometimes does on the keyboard:
gentle squeeze at the stem hole pops the pit and done.
Assembly line work, but all work has its repetitions.
We learn to love some, hate others, make peace with most.
Spread onto cookie sheets and into the freezer,
they are as bright as a pinup’s lipstick.
Rolling those frozen candy marbles into freezer bags,
I reserve four cups for the pie I’ll make next winter
to rekindle the joy of labor done long ago,
its taste a burst of the best of summer.
Cherries ready to freeze
YUM!!!!
Jana, so good to see you here from time to time!
My shorty dwarf and semi-dwarf cherry trees never ignited memories of tree climbing, I’ll admit…and they never will, now. Lost the older tree last year, and the younger one died down to a single branch this year. Can’t see how we will salvage it, but I haven’t had the heart to dig it out.
There’s one last pint of cherries rat-holed in the freezer, but the rhythms of picking and pitting will not be a part of this summer. Perhaps, though, inspired by your fine poem, I will find a verse in the assembly-line repetitions of weeding….
Andrea, this cherry tree, which is my neighbor’s still has branches hanging over the fence I can climb up to on my ladder, but the really delicious cherries are at the top, I’m certain, twenty feet away, and I haven’t been able to reach those for years. Thanks so much for liking the poem.
A pinup’s lipstick! Oh, Pat, this is a fun read. The picking and the pitting to the baking and the sitting, really loved the scope of this one! Beautiful work, in more ways than one.
That pinup is in the story I’m currently translating. Thanks, Jenny-Lynn.
Superb in so many ways. It also brought back my grandmother as she pitted the cherries from her trees, sitting on the front porch using a bent hairpin to deftly make work of pitting the bowls of cherries we had cleaned in the colander.
Lovely. You reminded me of sitting in Apple trees when I was young and eating apples while I read a book!
Ah! Kathryn, A tree-climbing memory from another climate!