Life is a bowl of cherries

It’s cherry season!!

There are two sweet cherry trees on 28th Street, and my they have grown. One of them was in the fire we experienced November of 2017, and got pretty charred on one side because the redwood shed burned to the ground, and they were close together. The trees also suffer from ants setting aphids on the leaves. Sometimes the leaves curl beyond recognition, especially on the tips. And man, they really want to grow tall. I keep ’em pretty short with summer pruning. Despite these problems, the cherry trees are fruiting and surviving.

There’s something about cherry trees–I associate them with luck, maybe because of a slot machine toy I had as a child? When I look up into a tree and see those happy red cherries dangling up in the canopy, my heart opens up. Especially when the sky is so blue, and the leaves are so green. What a crazy color combo.

While we were picking cherries, I was thinking about what I had read in an online class that I just signed up for. The class is one of a series of online lady permaculture teachings. This feminine angle is crucial for me–I’ve had a knee-jerk reaction against permaculture because in the aughts when I was learning more about it, it was always taught by some white guy. I’m sure a white guy can teach a permaculture class but why was it always a white guy? It made me feel weird. So the free class I signed up was just what I had been craving, the thing that had been missing from the teachings I had experienced before: it’s called Emotional Permaculture. It’s taught by Heather Jo Flores, of Food Not Lawns fame. What I love about her and this project is they are coming at permaculture from a female perspective, where the emotional landscape is just as important as your garden landscape. Here’s a quote from the course:

In the current culture of political and environmental chaos, it is more important than ever that we cultivate a personal ability to not only endure catastrophic conditions, but also to find joy in the process. 

My kid, Frannie, climbed up into the tree and picked a bunch of cherries. I have a photo of her from six years ago when the trees were first planted.

My friend Jibril, who caretakes the garden now, said he got quite a few cherries too, before the birds did. As we drove off, I thought about Flores’s words again: we are enduring and finding joy, even though there has been–and always will be–pain too.