And you plant your peach tree, and do all of the things that loving peach-tree-owners do: you water it and prune it and fertilize it and protect it from whatever it needs protected from. You do it because you love your peach tree, and because you know that these are the things you have to do for your tree to bear fruit. Fruit trees, after all, are not sources of instant gratification-- it takes three years for a peach tree to bear fruit, but those years are made easier by your eager anticipation of what is to come.
Then the long awaited season arrives, and you are excited; you start pinning peach cobbler recipes and researching canning and jam-making, and promising your neighbors that you will share your peaches. The time has come! you think, and you can already taste the peach juice.
And then your peach tree starts to blossom, and fruit begin to grow, and DUDE, THESE ARE CHERRIES, NOT PEACHES! WHAT? Seriously!?! THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A PEACH TREE!
(Ok, so I don't know if those trees actually look enough alike to be mistaken for one another. Maybe not, but you're an inexperienced gardener. It's an analogy, folks.)
So you shrug your shoulders and you tell yourself to buck up and you recycle all the peach-based recipes you printed out. And you're ok with it, because you still have a fruit tree, but it takes you a while to get used to the fact that this season is going to TASTE DIFFERENT than you thought it would. You're not unhappy, but you're not quite happy yet; it takes a while to shift gears.
But then one day you sit down on your porch with a handful of newly picked and washed cherries, and as you sit there spitting out seeds and staining your fingers with sweet cherry juices, you realize that you like cherries more. You don't remember why you chose peaches-- you liked them, and you still like them, but when you imagine sitting on your porch with a peach, you think what a lucky duck you are to have cherries instead. Cherries are expensive, and the season is short, and the cobblers are just as lovely.
And you think about how much you learned about fruit trees, and how it would be pretty easy to go to a plant-store with a more competent staff, and get a REAL peach tree, and start your own little orchard. And maybe if you would have gotten peaches, you never would have considered going back to get a cherry tree. You would have enjoyed the peaches, and made the cobblers, but you never would have started googling recipes that have both peaches AND cherries. They would be tasty together, you think.
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Ok, sorry, enough with the fruitiness. If you know me well, you know that I can barely manage any complex thought without turning it into some sort of over-long analogy, that eventually leads to me forgetting what I was talking about. Here's the facts: Until a few months ago, I thought that I would be hugging bolts of freshly-printed fabric right now. I thought I would have gone to Portland for market, and worn some sort of Mrs-Frizzle-esque dress made of that fabric. I planned on cutting enough fat quarters to roll around in them like Scrooge McDuck. (Ok, I didn't think of that one until now, but it would have been nice.) Them's the peaches I was hoping for.
But it wasn't to be. There was no great disaster, no horrible mistakes, no drama-- everyone did their job well, but it just didn't happen. It's not uncommon, I guess. And I'm fortunate that the previous years of tree-maintenance prepared me for this, because I always knew that some trees don't bloom when they should, or at all, or they die, and I learned to be cautious in my optimism, and kept from defining myself as a peach farmer. I just had a peach tree, and I hoped for peaches someday, and when I got cherries, it took some getting used to, but it didn't crush me.
What's the cherries? There's lots of them. One particularly juicy one is that I am fortunate enough to be writing patterns for my fabulous friend, Shea Henderson, of Empty Bobbin Sewing Studio. And I'm in really good company; you can read her blog post here about the new designers that will be putting out new Empty Bobbin patterns in the near future. These are some very skilled ladies, and I'm excited to see what they are going to do, and eventually to share the secret-cherries I'm working on as well.
And there's more cherries where those came from, but I won't go into all of them now, because already, there are SO MANY WORDS in this post-- but I want you to know that I am loving the cherries. Don't cry for my peaches, guys, I'm not worried about them. Maybe I'll have some someday, but if not, whatevs. Right now, I have cherries, and they are sweet.
