Cherry

A cherry is a little parcel with a stone in the middle, and the stone is a seed. Which means every cherry is a message from a tree, and the message says: plant me somewhere new.

But a tree can’t walk. So the cherry tree hires help. It wraps its seed in something sweet and paints it bright red — red is easy to spot from the sky — and waits. A bird swoops in, gobbles the sweet part, flies away, and drops the stone in a new place. The bird thinks it got lunch for free. The tree knows better. Cherries are bird food. We just found out about it and got in on the deal.

Every cherry starts as a flower. In spring the whole tree turns white and pink for about a week — thousands of blossoms, all at once, like the tree is having its one big party of the year. Every single cherry you eat was one of those flowers first, and a bee visited it. No bee, no cherry.

Cherries don’t hang about. They’re ready all together, for just a few weeks, and then they’re gone until next year. In Australia, cherry time lands right on Christmas — which is why a bowl of cherries on the table in December feels like part of the decorations.

A story people used to tell

In England, long ago, people said the cuckoo — a bird that sings its own name, cuck-oo — wasn’t allowed to stop singing until it had eaten three good meals of cherries. And children would stand under a cherry tree and ask it:

Cuckoo, cherry tree, good bird, tell me, how many years shall I live?

— then count the cuckoo’s calls, one call for each year, and hope the bird was feeling chatty.

Is it true? No. Birds sing when they sing. But the cuckoo and the cherries both arrive at the same happy time of year, and both leave too soon — and when people love two things that come and go together, they tie them together with a story. A story can be a way of saying we’re glad you’re here. That’s true even when the story isn’t.