Cherry-licious

Guess what? It’s cherry season here in the Yakima Valley. I’m still getting used to the easy availability and large quantities of fresh fruit in the summer here. One of the top reasons I like living here is all the super-fresh, super-free fruit. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who has loads of extra fruit. YUM. We think it’s pretty sweet.

My friend’s neighbor has a row of giant cherry trees lining her long driveway, so she invited all neighbors and friends of neighbors to come pick the cherries. They were BIG and SUCCULENT and JUICY-SWEET.

These trees were just LOADED with cherries. 

There were dark, almost-black Bing cherries—our favorites this year. The kind that stain little faces and fingers…

Jay has quite the method of extracting the pit from the cherry. His method seems to extract most of the juice too. Rose is not so adept at pit-removal. We have to do it for her. Once or twice (let’s be honest, there were probably more incidents that I didn’t see), she grabbed a cherry and chowed the whole thing, pit and all. Intestinal moan.

There were red and yellow Rainier cherries. So lovely with the blue sky background. How could I resist a phew photos?

Rose kept eating the squishy cherries that had fallen on the ground (see that vampiric  red crust around her lips?). I can’t believe she fell asleep on the way home, because we weren’t there for very long. We filled all of our buckets in less than half an hour.

We gave a whole big bucket away and practically forced cherries down the throats of anyone who entered our home. But today our noses told us that we had two and a half buckets of cherry wine a-brewing. So we tossed the rest. Yaaarrrg, the blasphemous waste. We did our best!

Now we are officially cherried out. 

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Cutenote: Jay and Rose have been partying and playing together for one or two hours after bedtime since we were all reunited. One night they fell asleep on the floor with the light on. Thankfully after a week, they seem to have settled back down into their fall asleep fast routine once again. They need the zzzzzs, believe me.