Everything is fine! Even when picking sour cherries

I have often called sour cherry picking day “the best day of the year” and it’s really not that much of an exaggeration, though it’s a day loaded with stress and anticipation. Kind of like waking up to go to Disneyland, really.

I love sour cherries so much and they’re so fleeting. Their picking season is short — usually about a week — and it always falls in late June. Last year I thought I might miss it entirely because we were in Maine for the first half of my Acadia National Park artist residency. (We managed to get there on the final day of picking, the day after our eight-hour drive home. Whew!)

I always wonder and fret on my hour-long drive to the orchard: Will there be a crowd? How many pounds will I get this year? It never really was worth my idle worry (I am forever an idle and constant worrier)… until this year.

A late winter freeze made the crop exceedingly small — I’ve never seen the trees so eerily barren, after only one day of picking — and there just didn’t seem to be enough to go around. Usually I bring Dan and we can pick more than 10 pounds in an hour, but this year I was on my own.

I found one tree loaded with small but bountiful cherries and went to work as fast as I could.

In another departure from years past, other pickers moved in on my tree, pulling cherries from the branches next to mine — a brazen move! No one ever picks from a tree that someone else has already started in on!

I became a feral squirrel, pulling branches closer to me and in one instance, getting a little snappish with a sullen preteen. (“Dude, this is my tree!”)

But this was not my first cherry rodeo. I had everything planned. Two buckets to even the load, wet wipes to periodically clean my sticky hands, and a luggage scale to gauge how many cherries were filling my buckets.

After almost an hour of picking, I did a weigh-in and the total was dispiritingly low: between 2 and 3 pounds in each bucket. “The cherries must be too small and light in weight this year,” I thought. And kept going and picking and defending my tree until my arms, face, and torso had more cherry detritus on them than the tree itself.

Forty-five minutes later, the tree was stripped and I was exhausted. I hoisted my buckets and dragged myself to the checkout truck, stopping to rescue a few straggler cherries left behind on other trees. Even if I only had 8 or 9 pounds of cherries, I reasoned, I could still make enough compote to last a year and bake one pie.

When my bags hit the orchard scale, I almost fainted in disbelief. The actual final tally: 17.9 pounds of sour cherries. My luggage scale had miscalculated! I don’t know how!

So after all my advance planning and in-the-moment worrying and pivoting and being disappointed and feeling like I was underachieving, everything was fine. I ended up with 5 pounds more than I technically needed to meet my goals.

Don’t worry, the sour cherries won’t go to waste. And I do feel a little guilty that I picked so many, but I deserve them! I fought for them! I love them!

In addition to being an inveterate worrier, I’m also hardwired to look for lessons or meaningfully teachable moments in my adventures. Maybe it’s the storyteller in me, always wanting to find a neat conclusion and wrap things up somehow.

Here, I’m not sure if I should take heart in the fact that things didn’t go according to plan and yet I still achieved my desired outcome, and/or that I was able to use my years of prep and planning to my advantage when thrown a curveball.

Both work. Or either do. Take from it what you will, I guess. Or enjoy it as another example of Casey’s School of Life.

All I know is that I’m incredibly grateful for every cherry I consume year-round, and I never ever take them for granted. Which might be the biggest life lesson of all.