Life's a Bowl of Cherries

Our cherry picking day is long gone; I love these photos and couldn't share them because I was having trouble uploading, so I just waited on the whole post. It was a beautiful Virginia summer day, not at all typical weather-wise. There was almost no humidity and it wasn't terribly hot. I think the folks at the orchard easily could have opened the groves for picking about five days eariler. We arrived to find far too many cherries molding on the trees. We were careful to instruct our little pickers (and the pbig ones too) about which cherries to pick and which to leave alone.  The toddlers were indiscriminate and Marisa and I found ourselves devoting most of our time to pitting cherries for increasingly stained one-year-old girls.It was interesting to see how the children's personalities emerged in the cherry trees. Gracie stood timidly in front of a tree and was helpless to do much of anything unless Katie did it first and then pushed Gracie along. Katie scrambled up trees fearlessly (a little too fearlessly) and was much more interested in the challenge of the climb than filling her bag. Ever the fashionista, she was pleased with her cherry-printed shirt and more than happy to pose for picture after picture. She did her fair share of eating ,too.
Nicholas was all seriousness and filled his bag with methodical precision. Knowing him, he probably counted cherries as he went.  Stephen and Sam made it a friendly competition. They climbed tree after tree and filled bags until they literally burst. The big girls wandered off to find a single tree of their own, climbed up with ease, and happily spent the entire time picking and chatting. Chatting and picking. Ever so happy to be outside on a glorious day, happy the cherries were ripe and sweet, happiest of all to have time in a tree with a kindred spirit. And the teenaged boys--they were all business. They helped Gracie in and out of trees and picked her cherries for her. And they managed to fill some bags of their own. I picked a fair number of cherries, but my favorite time of all was sitting beneath a tree, chatting with my own kindred spirit friend and snuggling a sweet, sticky wee girl who couldn't get enough of the whole experience.