There is a pie-cherry tree down the street just like the ones my grandmother used to have in her yard. It is a good year, meaning the cherry blossoms didn't get snowed on and since the tree is across the street from a hive of bees tucked down into the center of 140 year old Cottonwood trees, there were ample bees to pollinate the flowers. Now the cherries are starting to get ripe.
The cherries ripening always makes me remember the time my grandmother took me home with her on the bus. Luckily there was another little girl my age on the bus and we played happily on the twin seats as her mother and my grandmother sat behind us. She got off the bus about sunset and I promptly told my grandmother I was ready to go home now. I was shocked when she told me we were hundreds of miles away from home by now. I had been on long rides in the car before with my mother but when it was time to go home we could always just turn around and go there within minutes. That we had been driving steadily AWAY all this time shocked me!
My grandmother tried to comfort me as I cried. "Don't you want to see the cherries in the back yard?" she said, trying to coax me into cheerfulness.
I was up before dawn, out the back door, took a quick look at the cheeries and went back upstairs to wake up grandma and tell her I had seen the cherries, now I wanted to go home. I was a sad little pumpkin when I finally realized I was stuck at Grandma's house for a full week.
But she did let me eat all the cherries I wanted! And being spoiled rotten for a week was not a bad experience either!
It wasn't until I moved to this neighborhood that I realized that when the cherries ripen it is the anniversary of my week with my grandmother as a five-year-old!
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