Reign of Cherries

I didn’t think of the Northwest as a cherry hub. But apparently it’s a significant crop. I got a big bag of Bings from the grocery store and have been enjoying them all week, sliced and stirred into yogurt with honey and granola. It’s like dessert for breakfast!

We even have a cherry tree behind our apartment. It is huge, it towers above our second-story home. There must be bushels of cherries, but they are almost all out of reach, high above our heads. They rain down, from the time they are hard and green and not more than a pit on a stem until now when they are ripe and squishy, and coat the deck and invade our potted plants. Messy!

This is the first year I’ve tried eating them. They are actually not bad… Maybe I expected them to be very sour, but they aren’t. I wouldn’t call them sweet, either, and they are very different from the ones from the grocery store – they are pale pinkish-yellow with a rosy glow on one side. Quite pretty, really. Lately I’ve just been stepping out on the deck and grabbing a few from low-hanging branches.

A few weeks ago, from our bedroom window, we observed an ambitious raccoon climbing in the cherry tree. I was very surprised when I saw a large blurry animal (I was not wearing my glasses) and, since it was way too big to be a squirrel, my first impulse was that it was a cat. Nope… I could vaguely discern a very stripy tail and BN, with his superior vision, confirmed that yes, it was indeed a raccoon. Maybe it was that extreme-sports raccoon that braved the frozen pool this winter. It’s crazy how high that little guy climbed, since he was above our second floor window! I didn’t even know raccoons could climb trees. And it was full daylight.