I give you:
That is an arty close up of over a pound of cherries that I picked from our big ol’ cherry tree tonight. The key word there being “big”. The other night Liz and I noticed that our tree was full of beautiful cherries, but nearly all of them were out of our reach even with a ladder. Tonight, Graham and I realized that many of them were within easy reach, if you were on the roof.
So, I climbed up on the roof with a grocery sack and about 15 minutes later came down with my reward. These cherries are really, really good. The ones that are real ripe, like the dark one near the center of the photo, are extremely sweet and flavorful. Even the “average” ones are good. We had always assumed that they might be “pie quality” cherries, but they are much better than that. I don’t know how we’ve missed this bounty before. Maybe our timing is just that bad. Graham suspects that the tree is old enough that it doesn’t fruit profusely every year, which seems plausible to me.
One extra bit of excitement happened when I was trying to get down. I managed to accidentally kick the ladder over while trying to descend. After collecting myself from a bit of a scare, I decided to slide down onto the low roof over our fireplace and jump down from there. Worked great. In fact, I’m planning on using that as my usual descent method from now on, since lowering myself onto our too-short ladder like I usually do is hazardous at the best of times.
