I didn’t take its picture. Bad blogger. Just let me say it was a perfect cherry red with a faint, deeper stripe running down the center: big, plump, a work of art.
Written descriptions of Stella cherries that I’d seen call them almost black, and that was going to take at least another week. The battle with the critters had been ongoing and we’d been losing and looking at that pretty color I decided on the spot that, forget waiting for it to put on a little black dress: if it’s too underripe we’ll leave the other one a little longer. (Yup. We were down to two.)
Note that we had eaten grocery store cherries a few hours earlier.
I took my homegrown prize in the kitchen and sliced it down that stripe. The pit came out easily. I popped a half in my mouth…
…That would do. Wow. That would definitely do. For three years I’d wondered if I should have bought one of the varieties that had won the taste tests at Dave Wilson rather than the impulse-purchase tree at Costco. Did Costco get the unpopular leftovers? Had I, after all that work and water, deprived us of what we could have had?
As if.
I came around the corner and offered my sweetie the other half. I watched his face marvel as mine had. Wow that was good. “That’s definitely better than the ones at lunch.”
My thought, too, there was just no comparison. Next year we will definitely do the bird netting, in metal if need be, now that we know what we’ll get so much more of if we do.
In great self-restraint I left the other cherry in its clamshell on the tree for tomorrow.
We are savoring the anticipation.