I love cherries. They are normally too expensive to buy, but today they were only $2.99 at the grocery store. I have a fruit-buying price index...nectarines and peaches when they are below $2.00, apples below $1.50, oranges about the same. Bananas are cheap enough that I’ll normally buy them whenever. Below $3.00 is my green light to buy cherries. My price index is limiting at times, but honestly, the nectarines that show up in the grocery store in January are normally pretty nasty anyway - cheap normally means in season and fresh! So now I have 2.5 pounds of cherries. This is where the grocery store tricks you because they put the cherries in those nice pre-loaded bags with a sign that says $2.99 in big letters and “per pound” in dinky little print beneath. So, yeah, I paid more than $2.99 for my cherries. I guess I’m a sucker for fruit sales.

I’m headed out of town on Wednesday afternoon for the weekend and the cherries miiiight not make it through the weekend, so, hmm, I guess I’m forced to eat all of them before I leave. Hopefully I don’t get a tummy ache! I’ll have to pace myself.

As I was sitting here enjoying a few with lunch, I was thinking about all the cherry trees in Japan. They have a gazillion cherry trees in that country that beautifully blossom every spring. Yet I don’t think a single cherry ever grows on those trees. The plum trees bloom around the same time and you can get lots of plums and plum-flavored wines and liquors and candies and nasty pickled plum stuff and other plum crap...but I don’t remember any cherry goodies. Cherries in the Japanese markets weren’t very common, and when they did show up they were something like $6 or $8 for a little tiny bag of them, so we never bought any. So what’s the deal with all those cherry trees throwing their petals around every spring with no fruit? Have they bred the usefulness out of the trees to make them aesthetically-pleasing? That’s sort of sad.

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