Harvest!

For the first time in eight years, we actually got a crop from the yellow cherry tree on the south side of the house.

On the street where I grew up, there was a wonderful yard with two sour cherry trees (the biggest, fattest cherries I've ever seen, and the best ones for baking in a pie) and two yellow cherry trees. The yellow cherry trees were three stories high, with trunks nearly three feet in diameter.

In early summer, neighbors from all over the adjoining blocks would come, and tall ladders were placed against the trees, and people would fill buckets -- literally buckets! -- with the cherries, for eating and canning. Birds ignored the cherries because they were yellow rather than red; and though they were not as sweet as Bing cherries or black cherries, they had a wholesome flavor to them. Even after the neighbors were done harvesting, there were plenty of cherries for us kids from the street to eat by the handfuls. I don't know who owned the house and yard; it was a rental in those days. But no matter who lived there, the town's oldtimers came there for the cherries to supplement their larders.

Then, when I was about 13, the pastor of a local church bought the house to live in, and immediately cut those magnificent cherry trees down, both the sour cherries and the yellow ones. Neither then nor 40 years later can I find any sane rationale in that action. A shepherd of God's flock destroys trees that have fed people for decades? What sense does that make? My God, if he had at least been sectarian, he could have saved the fruit for members of his congregation and not allowed all the neighbors to come and harvest the fruit. But instead, he didn't give a shit about how poor people were on that end of town, and had the trees felled, never giving a thought to poverty and hunger.

Well, he's dead by now and I'm sure that God mentioned this to him, so I'll drop the subject of fruit-tree-killing.

I remember the taste of the yellow cherries fondly; they were big and meaty and not too sweet, and thus suited to my taste. When I found (about 10 years ago) a yellow cherry tree in Burpee's seed catalog, I tried to order one, but they wouldn't ship to California. Then I found a yellow cherry advertised in Stark Brothers catalog, and ordered not only a yellow cherry tree, but two other sweet cherry trees, two apple trees, and a nectarine.

We left the yellow cherry standing because it shades the south window of the kitchen. The rest of the Stark trees are gone, the apples because they were magnets for fire blight disease, the nectarine because the fruit, though large, uniform, and abundant, tasted like they were made of plastic, and the two sweet cherries because even after the trunks were four inches in diameter, produced not a single fruit. Buy from Stark Brothers, settle for mediocre taste, if any.

The fruit in the colander is from the two clumps of cherries that set this year. The trunk of the tree is about eight inches across; the cherries have a faint taste of the flavor I loved as a kid. Okay, the tree gets to live another year.

On the other hand, the little cherry tree (not quite three inch trunk) that Alex and John bought for us on our 30th wedding anniversary unexpectedly produced over a quart and a half of really tasty red cherries this year.

I didn't take pictures because we ate them all up so quickly.