8 pounds of cherries?

My first thought when I saw that we would be picking up 8 pounds of cherries tomorrow as part of our fruit share was: that is the size of a newborn baby! I just met with our potential doula, so baby is on the brain. But seriously, what are we going to do with 8 pounds of cherries? I don't even own a pitter. Can they be frozen? Pie? Sauce? The newsletter suggested keeping them at the back of the refrigerator. And then what? Maybe we should just eat them and forsake all other fruit for the near future.

When the boys were newborns, Rob took a week-long shift taking care of us and helping with his new nephews. He was mostly away from work, but he logged in for a few hours each day, usually at a coffee shop. But when he was at our house, he was changing diapers, sushing squaky babies, making dinner, mowing the lawn, and helping us laugh.

Somewhere in between work, washing burp clothes and playing Monopoly with us, he found time to harvest the fig crop. We hardly noticed the figs the previous year but this year, they were weighing down the branches and dropping onto the brick patio. Rob made it his project -- in the midst of keeping up with work back home, taking care of two 6 week-olds, and keeping two tired parents in good spirits -- to harvest the figs. All of them. He could have set up a stand and just sold them (and we would have had plenty left over) but instead Rob scoured the internet for recipes. Fig sauce (great over vanilla ice cream); roasted figs (great with whatever); fig saute; fig paste (not sure if this one ever happened); and of course just plain raw figs. We invited the neighbors over for ice cream and fig sauce multiple times and pushed seconds and thirds on dessert. We had figs on pancakes. We ate them raw. And they just kept coming in the door. We ate them for breakfast, we ate them for desert. I ate them in the middle of the night while pacing the house with Dietrich propped on my shoulder.

The plenty in our backyard was matched by the plenty in our house -- plenty of fatigue, plenty of crying from parents and newborns alike, plenty of questions as to how we would make it through to the next day. But we also had plenty of help, and encouragement, and love in the arms of brothers and parents and friends across the alley. We looked at the boys in our brief moments of clarity and marveled at their every move and that we had even made it this far. We learned how small we once were, how cared for we needed to be, how we still need care in our grown up lives.

I wonder if there has ever been a bumper crop on that tree like that summer. I hope someone is there to climb the ladder, pick the figs, and find new ways to eat them.

Our cherry pick-up is the day before we go camping -- with Rob. We will be limited to a small camp stove and an open pit fire, but surely we can come up with a way to work through a few pounds of cherries.