Cherries have always been my favorite fruit, nice dark firm Bing cherries bursting with that special sweetness. I've been addicted to them since childhood, but they've always been expensive and confined to a certain season. We didn't have much of a budget for luxuries when I was a kid, and my mom would buy only a quarter or a half pound of cherries at the time and parcel them out a few a day so I could enjoy them.

One of the things I vowed as an adult was when it was cherry season I would buy as many as I liked and katy bar the door at the expense; I'd go without something else.

This worked fine until last year. I've always hated places that bagged their cherries—you have to take all those insipid bright red sour ones and the flabby overripe ones along with the good ones, so I'd go to Harry's Farmers Market and patiently pick through the big bins of cherries until I had a couple of pounds. Well, last year Harry's went to bagged cherries, too, and I wasn't sure if it was that, getting stuck with all those inferior ones, or if I was just too stressed over my Mom and whacking out my taste buds, but the Bing cherries last year were dreadful; even the firm dark ones were sour.

They are the same this year. I even got a chance to "pick my own" this year when Harry's again had a bin of cherries along with the bagged, but even the ones that in previous years would have been juicy and sweet are juicy and sour. What on earth are the nurseries doing to fruit? Even the Granny Smiths are going downhill; when I first started eating them years ago they were round like Macintoshes and so delightfully sour; now they have telltale signs that they are being interbred with other apples, especially those nasty mealy awful-tasting Delicious (what a misnomer!) apples and they're nowhere near as mouth-puckering delightful as they used to be.

Now the cherries are being ruined, too.

I finally gave up over the weekend and paid through the nose for a little over a pound of Ranier cherries, which are still firm and sweet. But, damn, I miss the Bings; it's just not the same.

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 9:33:00 AM

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