Trees of my Childhood: Black Cherry

[muckefuck]

If there's an emerging theme unifying these entries, it's "trees that drop shit." Given how tactile children are, how engaged they are with their environment, it's not surprising that the plants most salient in my memory are those we interacted with, whether by climbing, picking, eating, or playing with.

There was a black cherry in our back yard on Dale Avenue. It was right up against the fence (built by my father, IIRC) separating our property from that of a kindly elderly woman, whose window I once inadvertently egged, and almost entirely surrounded by asphalt. It was also our climbing tree, the only one in the yard sturdy enough to hold us yet also accessible enough to be reached by the stunted lawn monkeys we were back then. One year, when we got a new appliance (a dishwasher?), we put the box on the driveway and took turns jumping into from the lowest branch. I don't know why it should hurt less jumping onto four millimetres of corrugated cardboard atop pavement rather than directly onto the blacktop itself, but it did.

I don't have strong memories of the little white blossoms that must've appeared in the spring, but I remember well the tiny purplish-black fruits that followed them. To my dismay, since I really liked cherries, these were strictly bird food. (One site I came across calls them "relatively taseless, neither sweet nor sour." Bullshit. They tasted nasty.) They're also so small, about the size of peas, that I didn't recognise them as cherries until I looked up what kind of tree it was. You could toss them by handful, like birdshot, which gave us athletic hopelesses the chance of hitting each other with them at least some of the time. One year, I picked so many that I filled a mason jar with them and left it on dresser. Months later, when I unscrewed it, I found that there had been enough moisture in them for some serious fermentation. In other words: They stunk to high heaven. In that respect, it was a child science experiment as successful as leaving a cup of milk on my windowsill for weeks on end.

I don't know what their range is, but I don't remember seeing more black cherries after this one, either elsewhere in Missouri or here in Chicago, outside of botanical gardens. A shame, really, since they attract a lot of birds. (For that reason, I tried putting the bluebird nest I made with my father under that tree, but it fell off the fence and broke before anything tried to nest in it.) But they're probably not showy enough for most folks.

Comments

[bunj.livejournal.com]

You left out the part where our older brother almost killed himself. Perhaps that doesn't fit as nostalgia.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

On the black cherry? I just remember the incident with the hedge clippers in a tree on the other side of the house.

[bunj.livejournal.com]

I thought the hedge clipper incident was on the black cherry, but I could be wrong.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

And don't be so dramatic! Sure, it's a big artery, but the hospital was only blocks away. At worst a eunuch.

[dilletante.livejournal.com]

black cherries were all over my neighborhood in northern virginia, growing up. i think they're relatively common on the east coast.

i always rather liked the taste, as did my peers. not much meat on a single one, though, so you have to eat a lot.

in contrast, the mulberries in our yard produced fairly tasteless fruit.

[sconstant.livejournal.com]

When you almost entirely surrounded the kindly elderly woman's window with asphalt, was that also inadvertent, or was only the egging inadvertent? Either way, you gotta be more careful.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I've given the poor old woman a protective buffer of commas, which should keep the asphalt at bay.

Back in Utah

[arkanjil.livejournal.com]

the mormons brought in many fruit trees, and where the homesteads were or where they had been, you'd find various fruitful treasures, given the right turn of the season. Along the Wasatch front near SLC, there were hills you could stand upon and look down into the newly made subdivisions, and you could still see the grid pattern of the cherry trees in their old orchards laying ghostlike over the modern curves and twists of the roads. The one summer when my dad ran a bbq smoker on the road, he went around and offered to clear out the old dying trees from farmer's fields gratis, and thus he always smoked his meats with apple or apricot or cherry wood. Damn fine eating, as was the lugs of cherries that he would buy in May, and the family would spend days pitting and bagging them for the freezer. They went mushy of course, but a bag of those cherries was a fine & cold summer treat, even in the dead of winter. Rarely did they last that long...

[gopower.livejournal.com]

How do you inadvertantly egg a window? Were you aiming for her cat?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

No, the wall. I just wanted to see what the egg splatter would look like. Honest. I figured the next rain shower would rinse it off.