The sky is a perfect blue this morning. A breeze ruffles my curtains, keeping off the heat that will develop later today. It is going to be our first hot day of the summer according to the weather forecast. A sudden change from the rainy, gloomy days of the past week. The weather an objective correlative of the past year.

I have just finished frying up a plate of bacon and have taken the biscuits from the oven. Lydia is still asleep. I’ll wait and eat with her when she gets up. In the meantime, I’ve got a bowl of dark burgundy Bing cherries to snack on. Lyd bought them yesterday when she did some light shopping. (I had gone out to the car ahead of her and was sitting on the tailgate with my oxygen. I must have looked forlorn because a woman who walked by me with a bag of groceries came back after a bit and offered me a popsicle. I don’t interact well with folks in general, so I thanked her but said no. Bless her for the thought!) The cherries must be from down south. We have a Bing tree and the fruit is only just now beginning to have a rosy color. I was touched that Lyd bought them; she knows my history with cherries.

When I was seven or eight, my Uncle Quentin and his second wife came through Wyoming on their way to visit mom’s family in Washington. They offered to take my sister and me along. This was an amazing offer on many levels. My uncle had been to college, the only adult in our family to do so, worked as a botanist for the government, and had divorced and remarried, a scandalous and fascinating history to us kids. It was the 1950s after all and such behavior was rarely discussed, so to get to travel with people who did such things was delicious. As we rode along, my aunt and uncle played games. We set up a list of things to be the first to see, like three white horses  and gambled 5 cents on each sighting! My uncle sang songs out loud that bordered on the obscene to us. I must have been impressed; I still remember the song.  (The liquor was spilled on the barroom floor and the bar was closed for the night, when a little mouse crawled from his hole in the wall into the pale moonlight. He lapped up the liquor on the barroom floor and back on his haunches he sat. And all night long you could hear him roar “Bring on the God damn cat”.) We stopped at restaurants and ate Chinese food!

It was an exciting adventure for two sheltered kids from the plains of Wyoming. The most distinctive memory I have is when we reached Oregon. Neither my sister Lora nor I had seen the green garden that is Oregon. Roadside stands offered fruit and vegetables that only reached Wyoming on an occasional and some what deteriorated basis. (Every fall, a train car of apples from Hood River would show up in our hometown and the Kiwanis raised money selling boxes of apples that were so much better than anything the stores had. My mom treated them like gold, and we had to beg to get one as a snack. Heaven forbid that we just got one out of the box without asking.) My uncle bought a giant bag of cherries at one stand and spent time showing us how to eat around the pit without breaking a tooth. Then, he had us roll down our windows so we could spit the seeds out the window. We could SPIT! My mother would have been mortified at the suggestion, much less the actual occurrence. Lora and I kneeled by our doors (this was before seat belts after all), and spit seeds. It was fabulous and we were eating cherries just so we could spit seeds. When we rolled through a small town, he suggested we try to hit pedestrians with our pits. It was just naughty, but of course we jumped right in. Eventually, my aunt suggested we slow down on the cherries, or we’d get sick. We did stop and did get sick.

A day or two later we stopped at the home of one of my mom’s sisters. It was a big old house and in the front yard was the biggest cherry tree I had ever seen, and it was filled with ripe cherries. The branches were thick and low. It was climbable, so we did. We didn’t go too high, just high enough to reach the cherries and discovered that, next to spitting seeds out a car window, nothing was as good as the loft and distance a seed got from a tree limb. Little did I know then that, years later, I would have my own cherry tree in Oregon.

The rest of the trip was a blur of camping in the Three Sisters area of the Cascades, where my sister and I discovered tiny green frogs the size of our fingernails and huge, yellow, slime covered slugs, both creatures totally unknown in our home on the western plains. We also sighted the trucks of a movie crew, filming Have Gun, Will Travel in Central Oregon. (Growing up in the 50s, television was saturated with cowboy shows, and I, living in Wyoming, was addicted to stories of the West. To actually see Paladin’s film truck, even from a distance of a mile or two, was an event only equaled by finding a Rocky Colavito in a pack of baseball cards. Rocky was a pitcher for the Cleveland Indians and the hero of the pitcher, Lloyd, on my little league Indians team. I was the bat boy and Lloyd’s hero was my hero.

Eventually, my uncle and aunt dropped us off with my grandparents, while they drove up and into the Olympic Peninsula, where Uncle Quentin was going to do some research. My father and littlest sister made a marathon trip from Wyoming to return us home. I do not remember much else of that trip.

And just like that, a few cherries bring on a cluster of memories. I do not know how that happens. A smell, a song, the taste of a cherry unlocks the door to memory that is a part of who I became. Being 70, I find that it happens more often now. Maybe it is because I have more quiet moments and so I am more open to past thoughts and feelings. Maybe it is just time to review events…I don’t know.

In any case, the sun is out, I have a chair in the shade, a book, and a bowl of dark, cold cherries. I think I’ll go sit and spit for a while.

Blessings.

Posts The Road