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Hello, lovely readers!
That picture up above? That's a *real* me selfie I snapped at 7:30 one morning mid-June after I'd already been picking cherries for an hour. No makeup, nice and sweaty (oooh, that sheen!), and loaded with (hard to see in the picture) scratches on my arms and oodles of bug bites from climbing up and around our last remaining cherry tree.
It's been 6 years (yes, 6!) since this cherry tree has had any fruit. We originally had 3 trees and had already lost 2; we thought this one was a goner, too. But... we didn't cut it down. We watched it almost die after it's last crop in 2016 (every single leaf withered and dropped by the end of June that year). We watched it flower then get hit by frost in mid-May over the last 3 years.
Then... BOOM! It came back with a bang this year and I picked about 25 lbs of cherries during the sweltering heat in my corner of Ohio in the second week of June.
Running, parenting, writing, LIFE...I've found that all of these are marathon-type events where focusing on the long game and final goals are the only way to keep going when the miles/toddlers/words/days seem near-impossible to overcome. So... this cherry tree has my respect and my heart. I'd given up on it, but it didn't quit.
And this year's harvest ? It was the best ever.
If you're dealing with a dead cherry tree in your life (metaphor totally intended), I hope you get the chance to see it grow and bloom and bear fruit again. More importantly, I hope you *have* the hope that it can because hope never disappoints.
(And yes, those are dancing unicorns and rainbows on the outside of my cherry bucket! My youngest daughter graciously donated one of her beach buckets for harvest time, lol!)
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