Ode to Cherries

My parents have cherry trees in their backyard. We went out yesterday to pick some and ended up having a photo shoot with Hudson. I love cherries and my last semester at BYU I wrote a little essay on cherries for a creative nonfiction class. I decided to post it for fun, but if you don't feel like reading it, just skip to the good stuff at the end-- there are a bunch of pictures. :)

A Word for Cherries

My husband Brandon and I were doing the dishes together the other day and I stopped for a moment to look at a plate. It was a smaller plate—dessert or salad maybe? I never know the difference. I have a lot of random plates this size. I am easily seduced by colors and funky patterns. This plate was part of a set of four that my Auntie Joyce had given me after a sort of deep, in-house cleaning before she moved from Northern California to Southern California. The set is white with a thin, dark green band around the rim. Each plate has a red fruit painted in the middle. There is one with a pomegranate, one with some type of small red berry, one with nectarines (or are they apples?), and the one that caught my attention: the one with cherries.

My mother and my aunt are a little bit obsessed with cherries. If there is a cherry on something, anything, Auntie Joyce will pronounce it indispensable and desperately wonder where it has been all her life. I actually think my mother likes things with roosters a little more, but she also succumbs easily to the draw of deep, red cherries. I remember when I was little I had knee length overalls from Esprit that were tan with big cherries on them. All my sisters had them. Joyce’s daughter, Brittany also had a pair. Brittany stayed with my family for around six weeks every summer while I was young. She is seven years my senior and I grew up thinking she was the most beautiful girl in the world. She was almost like a movie star to me, but she was better because she was “real” and nice to me. I was also named after her, although my name is just a variation on hers. During those summers we would play house, organize Olympic events where my sisters and I competed for little medals Brittany had made out of construction paper that seemed better than any real kind of medal, get and give make-overs, and play the endlessly magical Pretty Princess board game. One of my favorite memories from those days, though, is when we organized the “Cherry Club.” I honestly don’t remember what we did in those meetings, but I remember that we all wore our cherry overalls while we convened in my backyard, and I remember that I felt connected to something bigger and better than myself. Five girls in cherry overalls are better than one girl in cherry overalls.

During my teens, my dad’s job moved my family overseas. We spent three years in Salzburg, Austria. During those summers, my family vacationed in the South of France (I know, it sounds terribly exotic and spoiled, and I grant that maybe it was, but it so close to where we lived it was almost like driving from California to Utah). My dad would rent a vacation home for a week in Murs, France. Murs is outside of Gordes which is outside of Aix-en-Provence. This week was a fairytale I looked forward to all year. The house was older, made with French-looking stone and French-looking shutters. The backyard had a saltwater pool. It was surrounded by empty land, which belonged maybe to the city, maybe to large surrounding estates. But most importantly, it was surrounded by huge cherry orchards. And these were no ordinary cherries. They weren’t the puny-sized, orangey-red cherries you find at supermarkets. They were such a dark shade of crimson they were almost black. Every single cherry was the size of two normal American cherries, was perfectly firm, and had the sublime combination of sweetness and tartness.

I went running sometimes in those mornings. Well, I pretended to go running. In actuality I only ran from tree to tree, filling my hands and pockets with cherries like a little cherry bandit. We gathered giant bowls and baskets of cherries. We ate them with and in between every meal during those blissful weeks. I don’t know why we didn’t feel like we were stealing. They weren’t ours, but they felt like they were. Or maybe they just felt like they were everyone’s. They were communal cherries. They belonged to the brotherhood of man (and while we’re at it, let’s make that the sisterhood of woman, which, quite frankly, is more applicable to my family where females outnumber males six to two).

Sometimes I wonder if those cherries were really as good as I remember them being. It’s been almost six years since I tasted them, but the memory is still fresh. I close my eyes and I can see myself bite into (that’s how big they were, you had to bite into them) a deep scarlet cherry, can still feel the taste explode onto and into my senses. I guess it doesn’t really matter if they were or weren’t that good. It doesn’t really matter if we were or weren’t stealing (and let’s be honest, we were stealing). Those cherries connected us, to France, to Europe, to that moment, to each other. They brought me back to a time when I wore cherry overalls and competed for medals made of paper, the very best kind.

Loving grandma's shoulder :)

Grandmas are so funny :)

Walking back down the driveway to our house

Stopping for more pictures in the front yard