The other day while on my way home from looking at a property I was interested in purchasing I stopped at a road-side produce stand that has pies for sale. I bought a sour-cherry pie. It turned out to be one of the best pies I’ve eaten in a long time. The crust was almost perfect and the mix of sour cherries and sugar in the center seemed to explode in the back of your mouth during each bite.
It reminded me of when I was a boy and we picked cherries near Lake Erie each summer and brought them home to freeze in order to make pies through the remainder of the year. This endeavor was an all-hands-on-deck exercise for our family. My grandmother, mother, brothers and sisters, and any cousins visiting my grandmother were enlisted in the process of picking, cleaning, and pitting the cherries in preparation for bagging and freezing. We usually picked enough for about 150 pies.
I enjoyed the picking part. But the pitting was awful! And I was always relegated to the pitting table. We’d get home by late-afternoon after having picked from early morning until mid-afternoon, and immediately start the process of extracting the pits from each of the cherries. This was a tedious chore that no-one liked. On top of that – I was terrible at pitting. Only my father was worse…both of us were “all thumbs.”
During one session, when I was about 12, I couldn’t handle it any more…I started to take the pits and gently toss them over at my brother Troy. He had very bushy hair that provided an excellent landing spot for the pits to nestle into. After a few pits had found their perfect resting place he began to loudly complain. My mother shot me a piercing look while firmly telling me that if I continued sending pits into my brother’s hair I would spend the rest of the evening in my room.
It took me little to no time to take advantage of this pronouncement. I immediately launched another pit into my brother’s hair. My mother exploded and sent me to my room. With a huge smile I quickly left the kitchen. In no time at all my mother burst into my room with what seemed like fire coming out of her eyes. I can’t remember her words…they seemed to run together in a stream of intensity. Bottom-line, I was grounded for the next two weeks. No going to the school to work out and wrestle. No playing basketball. No baseball. No swimming. Just working in the garden and doing other chores around our home.
In the end – those two weeks were still worth getting out of pitting cherries…
Todd Rivetti 