Cherries of the night are riper
Than the cherries pluckt at noon
Gather to your fairy piper
When he pipes his magic tune:
Merry, merry,
Take a cherry;
Mine are sounder,
Mine are rounder,
Mine are sweeter
For the eater
Under the moon.
And you’ll be fairies soon.
In the cherry pluckt at night,
With the dew of summer swelling,
There’s a juice of pure delight,
Cool, dark, sweet, divinely smelling.
Merry, merry,
Take a cherry;
Mine are sounder,
Mine are rounder,
Mine are sweeter
For the eater
In the moonlight.
And you’ll be fairies quite.
When I sound the fairy call,
Gather here in silent meeting,
Chin to knee on the orchard wall,
Cooled with dew and cherries eating.
Merry, merry,
Take a cherry;
Mine are sounder,
Mine are rounder,
Mine are sweeter.
For the eater
When the dews fall.
And you’ll be fairies all.
In one sense, this past weekend ushered in the beginning of summer in the U.S. True, it isn't meteorological summer quite yet nor astronomical summer, which I always mean to celebrate, but don't, with a frolicking mid-summer fete. Nevertheless, Memorial Day weekend brings long lines of traffic at Kent Narrows as hoardes migrate to the beaches, the sound of Rolling Thunder coming to town, and the ability to wear white linen pants without fearing grandmothers everywhere are turning over in their graves-- all harbingers of summer for many folks in the DC area.
For me however, the first tell tale sign of summer arrived on Monday in the form of an e-mail from the orchard where I go fruit picking every year: Cherries will be ripe the end of this week. As the message pointed out, this is three weeks early. I usually coordinate my cherry picking with my blueberry picking, and while the berries on the bushes in the backyard do have a tinge of blue to them now, they still need another few weeks before I have to fight the birds for their limited bounty.
Cherry picking has become something of a ritual for me. I don't remember every picking cherries when I was young-- maybe because it was easy-- no squatting in rows of muddy straw like for strawberries, no digging deep in bushes full of prickers like blackberries or raspberries. My parents seemed to prefer taking us to pick fruit that had an element of discomfort to it.
Several years ago, when I first picked sour cherries (my favorite) with a friend at the orchard in question, I was amazed at not only how fast I could fill my bag, but at the way the fruit itself looked on the tree-- the ruby red globes glistening in the sun against the backdrop of the dark green leaves. I probably spent as much time admiring the cherries as picking them. But pick them I did and ever since then, my start of summer has been marked by an afternoon spent sprawled on a blanket in the backyard with a bowl of cherries, a glass of iced tea, and a good book.
To that end, I'm glad that during my cleaning frenzy over the holiday weekend I rearranged my bookshelves in order to devote one shelf to summer reading. Just as there are seasonal fruits, I believe there is seasonal reading. Tolstoy is best read in winter curled up with a cup of tea under a warm blanket and Virginia Woolf is best read under a tree in the languid, steamy days of late summer. I don't know why this is, it just is.
My earliest memory of assigning a season to an author goes back to when my mother introduced me to the Mary Poppins books. I still re-read these classics by P.L Travers each summer, often with a dish of raspberry sherbet as the two just seem to fit so nicely together. In later years when we'd holiday in the Outer Banks during late spring, I'd visit a little shop on Okrakoke Island and buy whatever Andrew Lang book they had in stock that I didn't already own. The ensuing weeks were spent indulging in a fairy tale or two at bedtime. As I was in graduate school at this point in my life, reading anything other than theology tomes was an indulgence.
This year there are 19 books on my wooden bookshelf and 7 on my virtual one that I hope to read this summer. I'll be posting my progress and short reviews in a Carpe Libris post each month but as I figure it, that means I need to read about a book and a half per week. Now I just need to go pick some cherries so I can begin . . .
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