Cherry Rain
"Is it starting to rain?"
"No," my wife replied, "it's the cherries falling."
I walked over to the screen door and looked out into the darkness. Cherries fell plop on the deck and ping on the gutters. It sounded just like the first huge raindrops that fall in advance of a summer thunderstorm.
This has been a banner year for wild cherries around here. They are so thick on the deck that I have to sweep outward from the door to keep from stepping on them. Stepping on them makes a purple stain on the wood and they get tracked into the house.
Wild cherries are about the size of an English pea and the pit takes up eighty percent of the cherry's insides so there is not much left for whatever one might want to make from the fruit. Gathering and pitting enough cherries to make a quart of jelly would be quite a chore. Besides, they are sort of bitter.
This evening a thunderstorm is building over the mountain and headed this way. Perhaps by morning the last of this year's wild cherries will be on the deck, waiting to be swept away.
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(The wild cherry tree, prunus serotina is native to Virginia and is also known as black cherry, rum cherry and mountain cherry,)
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