August 2008

Cherries play a role of some note in my food-obsessed imagination.  I grew in Montana’s Flathead Valley – the last stop each summer on the migrant pickers path arcing through the Northwest.

We had a single cherry tree in our backyard, next to the alley fence, and I remember I measured the progress of summer in part by the cherries on that tree.  I would watch them ripen as June slipped by, impatient for the sweetness I knew would come.  Then there were the orchard families in the Pentecostal church my father served as pastor.  A Sunday would arrive when one or more would mention to my dad that they had a box of Bings or Lamberts or Lapins out in the trunk for our family.  25 lbs of fruit that we would take with us for a week or two of vacation at my grandparents house on the north end of the lake.

The taste of a ripe chilled cherry belongs in a category all its own, but that isn’t the end of the joy.  With a cherry, after every last bit of flesh is teased off the pit, you get to spit.  Spit that pit as far as you can.  My sister and I along with my cousins would line up at the railing on the deck at the lake house and eat and spit until we were sick.  We’d do this day after day with our 25 lbs until we’d had our fill or the box was empty.

Summer without cherries is something less than summer, and grocery store specials don’t qualify.  Cherries need to be local, grown by someone you know or at least someone that someone you know knows.

The problem was that this year I missed cherry season in Montana.  Despite my best intentions to come ‘home’ early in July when every orchard has a roadside stand out along the highway, it wasn’t until the last week in August that I crested Lookout Pass on my way to the bay where our family still has land and beds for as many kids as want to return.  Yet as I left the interstate at St. Regis I saw a trailer parked in a vacant lot across from the gas station, and a sign leaning against the trailer proclaiming in handwritten letters: FRESH CHERRIES.  LAST OF THE SEASON.  I had to stop.

Lapins.  $5.99 for a pound and a half.  A little soft, but still sweet and with enough bite that there is now a trail of pits from the stop sign in St. Regis all the way to the junction of 35 and Highway 200.  If you can’t spit pits off the deck with your sister and cousins, spitting them out the car window at 60 miles an hour is an acceptable second.