Short post week #6 I think

This morning I pitted a thousand or so cherries. What does that have to do with a blog almost scrupulously devoted to never deviating for a single moment from clerk and library related issues? Well, I'll tell you. My co-worker, at the library, gave me the cherries, two gallons of them, from her cherry tree. These are tart cherries, meaning, you can eat them, walking around the library, but when you do you will involuntarily make horrible, contorted-by-sourness faces that cause people to ask if you're okay and to say no when you offer them some of your buckets of cherries. After this, the best thing to do with these cherries is take them home, sit on your back stoop and pit them. It's one of those things that seems daunting in terms of labor, but is actually pretty peaceable when you get down to it. Then you cook them with sugar. Then you get a thick cherry liquor (no, not alcoholic) that mixes with soda water for a fabulous soda. You also get incredibly delicious cherries to eat, or put over ice cream, which, ultimately would just be another way of eating them.

The back stoop part is important and I learned that the hard way. Pitting a thousand cherries has a strange commonality with what I imagine slaughtering a hog would be like. No matter how careful you are vivid red splatters strew themselves in wild leaps to places so far away that if it were a person you were splattering and they yelled out "Hey, careful! You splattered me with cherry juice!" you wouldn't be able to hear them. The sound would not carry that far.

I just love co-workers who give me things.