Cherry Season

1. My mother’s mother kept a set of painted wooden nesting dolls on top of her television. When I was small and went to her house, I would take the set apart and line up the five dolls on her living room floor, side by side, from biggest to smallest. The biggest was my grandmother’s mother, Maria Florence, and next were my grandmother, my mother, and me. I never knew what to do with the smallest doll, the only one that would not twist open and reveal her secret. I usually named her after my sister.

Maria Florence hailed from a place where cherries grow wild, a village between the current border of Alsace-Lorraine and the Rhine River. The village is technically German now, but the area is liminal, and who it’s ever belonged to is fuzzy. The cherries of this region are morellos, dark skinned, fleshy, and tart. They look sort of like bings, the sweeter eating cherries that grow in the U.S., but smaller and less sweet.

Morello cherries were brought to Europe by the Romans, whose empire’s eastern border was the Rhine River, and whose soldiers were given cherries as part of their provisions. It is said that you can trace the paths of old Roman roads through their former empire by following the growth of wild cherry trees. The soldiers spat the pits as they marched.

I love cherries. Given a pastry shop, given a choice, I would choose cherry streusel, cherry-filled bis-marcks, cherry kolache. I love eating cherries out of hand, worrying the flesh from the stones with my teeth. So do my mother, my sister, my daughter. So did my grandmother, who lay awake at night, pregnant with my mother, craving cherries. So did Maria Florence, who would have grown up on her mother’s cherry cake, cooked cherries simmered in red wine and cinnamon, drunk cherry liqueur.

I like to believe that I inherited from the women in my family a genetic disposition toward cherries—that cherry is a taste we nurtured over many centuries.

Other facts about the women of my family: Our hair never turns gray, except for one streak at the left temple. Each of us gets angry or passive at the very moment it would have been more useful to do the opposite. Each of us has said at one time or another that we did not feel mothered by our mothers. “I know my mother loved me,” we all have said, “I just never thought she liked me much.”

Cherries are members of the rose family, a sprawling group whose leaves are leathery and oval shaped, with jagged edges. Strawberries, blackberries,, stone fruits with a single pit.