Oh and those Michigan cherries up in the Grand Traverse!
I spent two summers at Interlochen playing in the World Youth Symphony in 76 and 77; we ate those sweet fat juicy black cherries until we were ready to burst!
We do the subscription for a weekly shipment of 13 peaches for 8 weeks. Unbelievable. This way we don't have a glut of peaches that we have to process and we have wonderful juicy peaches for the entire season. They are packed in a box of foam with 13 cutouts for the peaches to fit in so they don't get bruised in transit. So we both have a peach every day and by the time we eat the box, a new one arrives!
And speaking of orchards. My grandmother's apples were gnarly old white cooking apples (Bergapfeln) that were perfect for pie, steweing, applesauce, and strudel. They were small, mealy, tart, and not an apple one would like to eat.
However, up the river were the orchards of Normandy: 100 acres of every apple tree known to man that would grow on a bluff overlooking the Ohio River. We would drive in with my Dad's pickup truck and spend a lazy and sunny September day driving around looking for the perfect apple. We'd drive up to a tree and we would all get out to grab an apple off the tree to taste it. If we liked it we picked some. If not, we drove on. And with that many apple trees, we were very particular. It had to be a crisp, juicy sweet-tart apple hitting on all the flavor profiles. There were some heirloom goldens that I still mourn not being able to have now. They were that amazing.
