By Candace Dow

Candace Dow still enjoys the fruit from the trees she planted long ago in a yard that’s no longer hers.

As I held the box of ruby-red Meteor cherries, it took me back to my former duplex in Minneapolis as surely as Dorothy clicked her ruby-red shoes to go home to Kansas. The hand-lettered sign had drawn me like a magnet. I didn’t remember ever seeing fresh sour cherries for sale. As I peered at the plump fruits in the clear quart box  in the co-op’s produce section, memories of sour cherries bombarded me.

On sunny July afternoons, I walked to the front of the house to check if more red cherries had ripened to deep mahogany for an after-work snack. Noisy sparrows in the dwarf tree on the hill down to the street announced the North Star cherry season. As I approached, sparrows streaked from the tree with a whir of wings. Sparrows on the far side of the tree twittered and pecked at fruit.

Late afternoon sun heated the shiny fruit. If I pinched and pulled a ripe, unpecked cherry right, the stem and stone stayed on the branch. Sticky juice from the yellow, tender flesh ran down my fingers. I tasted the first sweet-tart cherry of the day.

Later in July, the sparrows and I moved on to the semi-dwarf tree closer to the house for the tarter Meteor’s large, bright-red fruit with reddish-pink flesh. Some evenings, as a cherry crisp or cobbler baked, the fruity smell filled my kitchen. Though my results varied, I ate all my experiments.

My first taste of sour cherries came when a friend asked if I’d pick her backyard tree. I liked the sweet-tart, juicy fruit. After a few years, she only needed to leave a phone message, “The cherries are ready.” I knew to pick them within a day or they’d go to the birds.

One year, tenants at her Richfield apartments didn’t want cherries from the trees by the building. She offered me the fruit. As I stood on the stepladder and picked cherries in the late afternoon sun, shiny silver planes on approach to the airport roared so low and near I saw passengers. I waved. Some waved back. I remembered why I had cherry trees. After my push mower and I fell down the steep hill from my duplex to the public sidewalk, I vowed to eliminate mowing. With good memories of sour cherries, I planted two varieties. In the late 1980s, long before edible landscaping gained a following, I learned to say I wanted to enlarge my garden, rather than remove my lawn.

My cherry trees delighted me all year. Bright yellow leaves signaled fall. Snow settled on twisted branches like hoar frost on windows. Spring brought the heady aroma of masses of white flowers on the deep-brown, smooth, sometimes shiny, thicker limbs. Rain and wind scattered petals like miniature paper punches.

Candace Dow’s publication credits include Cooperative Grocer magazine, Mix, StarTribune, Wedge Co-op newsletter, and Hill & Lake Press, her neighborhood newspaper

Recipes in this article:

Fresh Sour Cherry Crisp