Mmmm

That's two pounds of fresh-picked sweet cherries, courtesy of yours truly! Yesterday we went to a potluck dinner held by one of the faculty in Sean's department, and one of his professors told us that she had just been cherry picking with her kids the day before, and said that although it's the very end of the season, I might be able to get some if I went today. Sean didn't come, as he was supposed to be working on his project (due to the same professor), but as I type this he's continuing what must be a near-record streak of procrastination.

On the map, the orchard was pretty close, only 15 miles away, but getting there reminded me how very rural Virginia can be, and how much of a surburbanite I really am. After heading down Route 29, a major thoroughfare, I turned off onto county road 633 (everything hereabouts is a county road), which is a pleasant, if narrow, little road that runs by some farms. Then it got really narrow, with no shoulder, leaving me uneasy how this would work if another car came around one of the turns. Then this skinny little strip of blacktop stopped being paved at all, and became a very bumpy gravel lane that started to rise steeply, winding through the mountains. Every fifty feet there was a completely blind curve, so I was driving about 20 miles an hour and hoping that no local was about to come speeding through. The road was so rough that I thought the car might shiver to pieces right underneath me, it was shaking so badly, and the road behind the car was completely obscured by the dust and dirt it kicked up. This was terrain suited to a pickup truck, not a 1994 Buick LeSabre!

By now I was in a densely wooded area, with the trees occasionally breaking to reveal beautifully lush valleys below. At one point I glanced out the window at a particularly nice view, only to look back and see a deer running across the road in front of me. I'm used to deer, but not in broad daylight. As the car shuddered further up the road, there were a few houses dotted here and there. Their sheer isolation caused my inner suburbanite to wonder, How the hell do they deliver mail up here? Jesus, what do they do when it snows? I mean, Sean was trapped in his apartment complex for four days this past winter, because no one in Charlottesville owns a shovel and there are so few plows. What did this people do, ski down the mountain?

Going seven miles on this road took about twenty minutes, but eventually I reached the orchard. It was indeed the very end of the cherry season, so the trees had been almost completely picked over, but I was able to come up with my two pounds of cherries after about an hour of squinting under the tree branches, looking for that elusive bit of dark red. It's more fun to pick cherries than it is blueberries (though we plan to do that too, in August), but it's not cheap: my two pounds cost $9, more than they would in the supermarket. But the taste. They're fucking delicious! Granted, I'm not a connoisseur, having only begun to eat fresh cherries last year in Spain, when our grocery-store breakfasts consisted of them together with bread and jam. Still, Sean was in agreement that these were the best damned cherries he'd ever tasted.

Next year I'll have to come down earlier so that we can hit the orchard when the trees are still loaded with fruit. Honestly, I'm not sure what I'd do with more than a couple pounds of cherries (blueberries freeze really well, so they're easy), but hey, a surfeit of delectable fruit is never a bad thing. Next time, too, Sean can drive!