Pam’s Pictorama Post: A few different things conspired to prompt a rather wonderful childhood memory recently. The first was our friend Bruce bringing over a bag of Ranier cherries – the ones that are sort of orange fading to a bright red, rather than the dark maroon of the more common ones. Despite the story I am going to tell, I somehow came to gobbling cherries late in life, but have eaten them with an abandon to make up for lost time. I generally buy the dark red ones, but cast no shade on the Ranier variety.

The next things was this little device shown at top – a cherry pitter. I also use it for pitting olives. I was in New Jersey a few weeks back and realized that I only had my decades old one, acquired in cooking school tucked happily away in our New York apartment.

Not much to look at yet it is perfectly adequate for these two tasks and if you are trying to cook with either cherries or olives it is a much needed and appreciated tool. To be without it means any chance of a perfectly sliced cherries or olives for decorative effect will likely not happen. I promptly ordered the contemporary equivalent from Amazon. I searched cherry olive pitter and there is was. The beauty of the internet age. I sent it to NJ and it was waiting for me when I got here on Wednesday; it is a decidedly zippier, upgraded version. A happy summer of cherry and olive pitting awaits.

Meanwhile, the memory in question was one of an annual cherry picking at my grandmother’s house. She had an enormous Ranier cherry tree in the backyard. In retrospect as an adult I don’t think I realized that cherry trees got that big. It required a proper ladder to get to the top.

Anyway, the kids, spouses of kids and grandkids were all assembled and we picked cherries all day. There were sea green plastic buckets I can still see in my mind and we filled them with those orangey red cherries. My grandmother would then take them and cook them down and can them. They would supply pie filling and get spread on toast for the rest of the year and long winter ahead. (Mom’s mom who I have written about before here with a historic photo of that yard – sadly the tree was in the other direction and would have been tiny!)

Oddly, I don’t remember eating them off the tree. Now, I was at the time probably the youngest family member of the team, probably about five or six at the time I am describing before my brother was born. Perhaps my mother, always a worrier, didn’t want me eating pit filled cherries. I can see her fretting about that. Anyway, I didn’t and somehow didn’t really get into the swing of eating cherries until I was more or less an adult. If I were able to visit that tree today I’d be popping half in my mouth as I went, eating my body weight in cherries off the tree.

On one of those days I remember it ending in, if not a barbeque at least a picnic. (My Italian grandmother wasn’t really much into barbeque – she liked to cook her food on her stove and in her oven and make the table grown with delicacies which were not of the grilled burger variety.) I wandered around and found my way to a small tree. Much to my horror, as I touched the tree I was immediately covered with ants! I screamed the way only a small child shocked by ants can scream. It took a minute for mom to figure out what was wrong with me, get them off and set me right. (Tree must not have been well to be full of ants, but I don’t remember much about it.)

Perhaps that memory came back to me because as I write this I am sitting on my deck in New Jersey, in the evening of July 4. Next to me on the fence I share with my neighbor, I discovered a huge and evidently industrious ant colony. I can see those hard working fellows even by the dim light of my fairy lights out here. Do ants ever stop and rest? These don’t appear to as I spotted them early this morning and they are still at it.

A gentle boom, boom of distant fireworks is going off, but not enough to bother either me or the five New Jersey cats who have had their dinner and are largely sleeping. Fireflies have come out and look like miniature versions of the fairy lights. (People ask me if we still have fireflies and I am glad to assure them we do – have they really disappeared from places?) The mosquitoes, whose enthusiasm for my flesh has been somewhat tempered by some spray will chase me in soon. But my first evening on the deck this year and I guess summer has begun.