Cherries

There are two sour cherry trees between our sidewalk and the street, planted by our landlords around when their oldest kid was born, which we know because they buried a placenta under the tree on the left, which always makes more fruit.

In spring the trees blossomed, and Brent's bees came over from his back yard and vibrated in the flowers. By May we could count the green fruit dangling from the tree, and by the start of June they were pink enough that people would mistake them for ripe Rainier cherries, pick them, and spit them out. The cherries make me prideful in a way I rarely am, and I wrote on a piece of cardboard: "SOUR CHERRIES ARE NOT RIPE, AND IF YOU PICK THEM, THEY NEVER WILL BE." I asked Alyssa if she thought this was too cruel, but I already knew it was. Instead, I hung signs that said "SOUR CHERRIES ARE NOT RIPE. PLEASE LET THEM CONTINUE TO GROW, WE HARVEST THEM WHEN THEY ARE READY" Without fail, if a couple walked past, one person would read the sign out loud to the other.

Last summer the trees produced a boom crop, and even after harvesting for hours each day, I couldn't pick them all before they rotted. We had around 70 pounds of good cherries, which we froze. When our freezer died in the winter I drove them to a friend's house. On June 13, with this year's fruit already red in the tree, Alyssa baked what was left of last year's harvest. She made three slab pies for our friends and neighbors, each pie the size of a full sheet pan, and we sat on the front porch and ate pie and drank cherry lemonade. Kyle brought his truck and stepladder, and with last year's cherries still in my teeth, I started harvesting again. Every day for a week I put the ladder into the bed of the pickup, extended it as high as it goes, and hung a bucket from each side of the ladder: one for good cherries, and one for bad cherries.

I spend hours on the ladder picking cherries, surrounded by so many fruit that it's hard to decide which to pick next. I wear a silly fishing hat so that I can push my head straight up through the dense canopy, up to the top rung of the ladder, where I sway in the breeze, 15 feet above the road. Earwigs crawl across my neck and up my legs and I have to slowly reach down and knock them out of the way so that I don't lose my balance and drop myself out of the ladder. I bring my phone up into the tree with me and listen to any baseball game that's on. People walk their dogs under me and I hear pieces of their phone calls.

This year, western cherry fruit flies got to the cherries before I did, piercing into the unripe flesh and laying eggs. In the full hot sun I could see dark veins in the transparent red fruit, the curving path the maggots took as they ate their way to the surface. When I cut into an infested cherry with my fingernail the fruit was brown and ruined. I picked cherries with maggots still dangling embarrassingly out of the skin, newly awake and stupid. I would pull a cluster off the tree and find one cherry good enough to keep. I optimistically sorted some into the good bucket, then pitting them in front of the TV in the dark living room, I'd put each cherry on top of a flashlight and see the carnage the maggot had caused. Some were salvageable, but most were spoiled.

Western cherry fruit flies are hard to control without pesticides like spinosad, which would kill the bees if we weren't careful. The next best way to mitigate them is to remove all infected fruit, and I spent the past week harvesting madly, pulling every cherry in arm's reach, nearly all of them brown and rotting from the bacteria that the flies introduced. I poured buckets of cherries into black garbage bags and left them to cook in the sun to kill the maggots. Alyssa filled a watering can with water and nematodes and poured them into the dirt under the tree, where the fruit fly pupae spend their winter. We hope the nematodes spend the winter eating the pupae, but we won't know until next year.

We live on a busy stretch of sidewalk, and on a bikeway, and once the cherries ripen it's hard for people to pass by without taking notice. Up in the ladder, cyclists pass under me and exclaim. People ask if they're sour cherries, and I say yes they are, and they'll say they used to have a sour cherry tree back in Michigan, and I get to say that I lived there too, and what part are you from? It's all so wonderful, dripping sweat, covered in juice with moss from the tree stuck to my hands, meeting our neighbors.