One of the interesting things about our apartment is that the building was landscaped when it was constructed with fruit trees. We have blueberries, strawberries, golden plums and Rainier cherries.
I’ve been watching the cherries ripen on the tree for the past few weeks, and today as the temperature neared 80, I decided it was time to harvest a few. I was concerned that the birds had beat me to all the good ones, but I need not have worried. The tree’s branches were weighed down with fruit.
At first I was pulling them off of their stems but quickly figured out that it was better to grasp them by the stem and twist away from the tree. As I did this, muscle memory took over. I’d completely forgotten, as I am wont to do, that as a child my grandfather had showed me how to harvest cherries. He had been, among other things, a fruit farmer in the Yakima Valley.
It was an unsettling experience, and also a moving one. I could feel his hand guiding mine.
As childhood memories warm our hearts
May the momories of family members past
soothe our souls
May the memories of our childhood warm our hearts
As the momeries of family members past soothe our souls
An oddity to note on this entry:
I entered it initially via voicerec, under IBM’s ViaVoice 3 on OS X.
I finished the Lasky-Stump interview transcription largely because the application works as well as it does – which, in the right circumstances, can be pretty darn well.
Whee! We had cherry trees in the back yard when I was a kid. We covered them with netting to keep the birds out, made preserves and wine and ate a lot of them straight off the tree. I still miss those trees.