Cherries are my Happy Fruit, my favourite fruit.
Bring me a bowl and I’ll be your friend forever.
There were two cherry trees in the backyard where I grew up in a suburb outside of Toronto. I loved them in the springtime, full of blossom and promise.
When the cherries were ripe I’d climb up into the tree and eat them right off the branch.
Biting into a cherry today brings it all back: the sound of my shoes scuffing on the tree trunk; the feel of the papery tree bark; limbs that made me wide embracing perches to sit upon; and the cherries themselves, so red they were almost black. Fat and juicy. It was a mercy to get them before the birds.
My mother told me I’d get sick if I drank milk on a stomach full of cherries. I’m not sure if there is any truth to that, but I still won’t combine potentially lethal dairy products with this lovely fruit for fear of my stomach exploding.
My parents would pick many baskets of cherries which my mother often preserved in mason jars for us to eat during the cherryless months. The longer they sat on our basement shelf the more firmness and colour would disappear. Spooning these pale, soggy shadows of summer into dessert bowls was the saddest thing imaginable, and I never enjoyed them when they were like that.
