asakiyume | cherries and blueberries (Reply)

Last weekend

mallorys_camera invited me to pick sour cherries and blueberries at Samascott Orchard in Kinderhook, NY.

What an experience! I've never been to such a huge orchard. You pay to enter and then can *drive* to the place where you want to pick.

mallorys_camera and I scoffed at this, but soon we realized that people who come here to pick are not playing, and with the amounts they're picking (pounds and pounds--enough for all their home canning; enough for their roadside stall or their home pie business), yes, you would want your car nearby.

And wow, what an international bunch of people it attracts. Did you think you needed to go to a big metropolitan center to hear a panoply of languages? Why no! Come to this orchard! The first family we ran into were exclaiming over the unripe fruit of a particular tree.

"I've never seen this fruit in America!" said a man.

"What is it?" I asked.

"I don't know what it's called in English, but in Turkish we call it [word I don't remember] which is something like 'sour apricot'"

He turned and started talking to another man in Turkish.

Like us, this family was trying to get to cherry trees that hadn't been picked over. Eventually we hit the jackpot. "Dad!" a kid in their family called. "This tree has two thousand cherries!!"

Some of the trees were so loaded with cherries that branches were weighed down to the ground.

Here are some of those two thousand cherries:

On our way to the blueberries, we could hear families speaking in some Southeast Asian language, and when I was crouched down picking, I could hear a guy from Israel (probably? from some of the things he referenced) talking to a woman about the history of the YMCA. "I want to write about the transition from empire to [unintelligible] through the YMCA."

Here are some blueberries and milkweed.

I heard a girl exclaim, "This one is as big as my thumb!"

While we were picking blueberries a handsome young guy with a Jamaican accent tried to interest us in a cruise on a yacht. Since

mallorys_camera and I are, shall we say, of an age that makes us unlikely partners for handsome young guys with Jamaican accents ("Speak for yourself!" says MC from off stage), I suspect he was looking for generous patronesses, which is hilarious, but that accent is beautiful, and I enjoyed the flirtation all the same.

As we headed back to our cars we passed some Polish speakers, and also a South Asian mom using an umbrella to shelter her child, who was sleeping in a stroller, from the sun (there was actually sun that day--but then it did rain, of course: practically every day this month it's rained at least a little and more often than not spectacularly).

Before paying for our haul, we decided to have some lavender ice cream (marvelous!). The wall carries lists of plates of cars caught stealing as a warning not to try similar:

They, too, are not playing: they search your car when you go to pay. They opened my overnight bag that had my previous-day's clothes in it.

paying, and car search

While we were eating ice cream, I saw these two. The woman's skirt was full and flouncy, and then she popped that hat on her head and looked straight out of a brochure for Bolivia or Peru.