Picking cherries.......

[Charlie]

Hello everyone,

The morning is cool, darkness has all but left, only its shadow lingers
and gradually lightens and the poultry haven't yet come of their
roosts. I have taken Poppy out to attend to her toilet, like all
puppies, it's best to take her out the minute she wakes from sleep.
Returning her inside, Jake the wombat comes out with me to spend a
little time feeding and playing in this temperate half light as we walk
up the hill to where we hope he will make his eventual home when he's
ready for release. As we wander over the short and sometimes dry grass,
lichen adorned rocks and gravel he stops and samples whatever takes his
fancy, crunching stones as we travel on our way. This morning we go
more quickly as I am in a bit of a hurry, because there are cherries to
be picked and bottled before the temperature rises to the uncomfortable
high thirties expected. By the time we have returned and Jake is once
more ensconced in his room, the poultry fed; a bucket and poppy
snatched up from the floor, we are on the way to the the two cherry
trees just outside the cottage.

There is a great deal of activity around the cherry tree even before
the sun has climbed the other side of the hill to the east of us. Yet
across the valley the peaks are turning yellow, and pausing to watch,
this colour flows down the slopes as if governed by gravity of which
this yellow light, emissary of the sun, is not but still flows down
toward the valley floor like treacle, slowly and inexorably. Poppy runs
around under the cherry tree and my feet. Each time I look down to
locate her before taking a step, I see she has a cherry stalk poking
from her mouth like a toothpick. Zoe our poddy sheep is feeding on the
cherries that fall past my bucket and also eats any leaves that come
down as my hands move through and along the branches.

Looking up as I stretch to reach the higher whipy branches to pull them
down so the seed of the tree is within my reach, I see the Rosella's in
the higher canopy, squabbling. As if there are few cherries,
insufficient to share even amongst themselves and yet the trees are
loaded, so much so that the branches have been weighed down by their
heavy burden to allow the sheep to eat the branch tips as well as any
cherries growing too close to the end. The sticky juice of the fruit
stains my hands runs down my arm and fruit falls into the open neck of
my shirt, and there is an intermittent bombardment of half eaten
cherries and pips raining on my hat, discards from the feast enjoyed by
the colourful harvesters able to reach the fruit much closer to the
sky. The shade beneath the tree is welcome, but the sunlight
occasionally stabs between the leaves as the branches are manipulated
to access the fruit and pokes into my eyes.

The two cherry trees are seedlings from a mazzard cherry, without graft
or any other attempt at cloning. Their parentage has ensured they are
strong, fecund and also created in them not only a better ability to
survive, but as well a sweeter enclosure round the seed than their
parent which is harvested by all manner of birds and animals that carry
the potential trees further away. The gift of this fruit is seldom
bestowed upon us, because the birds usually take them from the tree
long before we can get even a nostalgic taste. This year there are
fewer birds so have trees filled with red berry's of which this early
pick will go mainly into bottles. We hope to bottle a great deal of
fruit this year and cherries are the first participants in this
endeavour.

Amidst this gratitude of fruit and in such abundance there is pause?
Why are there so few birds, Rosella's, silvereyes and currawongs, who
usually eat the fruit and don't share at all well with us, but who have
an intrinsic value sufficient for us to enjoy having a little less or
nothing at all? Very few young Rosella's have come to help themselves
to the uncommon food we grow in this place this season - though they
are usually abundant. The fruit is a blessing though does it compensate
for the lack of birds. We examine the new balance created and ask the
question of ourselves. Is this difference, which is obvious enough that
we take notice, really any better?

Be well,
Charlie
--
Registered Linux User:- 329524
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We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The
memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of
present ones. There have been visions of such breadth and brightness
that these motes were invisible in their light.....Henry David Thoreau

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