What could be better than eating a bowl of fresh, ripe, sweet cherries in the summer?  Last weekend my tribe and I dove to Leona Valley to pick cherries. It was an incredibly joyous outing for the kids. The drive is a little more than an hour from Los Angeles, and you can always take the scenic route through Bouquet Canyon which hugs a beautiful river along the way. The day we were there, there was a special cherry sale where you could fill up a big bucket for $20.  Here is the web site for all the cherry picking farms in the area:

The one we went to was an all organic one which doesn’t have a web site but they do have a face book page. They are Leona Valley U Pick Organics. Their email:

 

The Story:

As a child growing up in a rural area in Iran, some of my fondest memories are of my brother and I climbing the cherry trees in our garden, and just eating handfuls of sweet cherries for hours. I also remember my American grandmother coming to visit us and having us pick the cherries for fresh pies. (On Nourish there will be a pie recipe that is close to the ones we had.) When we had to escape our home because of the Iranian revolution, one of the things I would obsess about was whether or not the cherry trees were still there. Even as a child I was a conservationist, and the idea that somone may have taken our trees down would drive me to quiet hysteria. We also had to leave our myriad of pets, which took me many years to process. I used to have fantasies about returning to our home and our pets running out to greet us after our long absence. The house in tact just as we left it . . .

There is something so poetic about Cherry Trees. My most favorite play is The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, who always drew upon the spiritual impact of trees and nature. At the end of the play, the family must sell off their glorious Cherry Orchard to pay off debts to the man who grew up as a servant on the estate. The culmination of all of these ironies juxtaposed against the sound of axes chopping the trees is truly tragic and moving. Over a year ago I felt like I was living a scene from that play. The last house I lived in was surrounded by beautiful trees and sadly as I was renting the house back from the buyers for a few months after the sale, they came in and chain sawed all the trees on the property. I have been through many things in my life, a revolution, death of a friend as a teenager, divorce, overcoming illness, but that event truly devastated me. To see all the stumps after the frenzy of chopping made me lose a little faith in my species. My daughter who was four at the time just kept running around the barren property screaming “savages, savages!” Indeed there are savages among us, but we can do our part by planting trees and fighting for local laws to protect our treasures. I was able to save the two hundred year old oak tree on that property which gives me some solace. At our new house we are surrounded by glorious green giants, and maybe sometime soon we will start planting our very own cherry trees!