I went for a walk this evening and got cherries

I have been walking a new route this month. I started doing a couple loops in order to stay close to home when my walking turned sort of painful a few weeks back. It's all good now, but since I am enjoying this new route, I've been walking it regularly to mix things up.

Every day I passed three cherries trees and every day they got more and more red until they began screaming, "Please pick me!" Each day the house looked deserted and the trees were still packed with cherries. It killed me to see them go to waste.

Tonight, I had walked just a couple blocks from home and there was a man standing at the trees with bags and boxes. He was picking cherries.

I'm so smooth. I said something about how beautiful the cherries look and how I pass them several times each day. He said they belong to his friend who owns the house, but he gets to pick them.

He said, "I'll have a bag for you when you come back."

So I walked the loop again and came back up to the trees. The last time I picked cherries was from my mom and dad's backyard in Tennessee, but I sort of enjoyed it.

The man lifted the grocery sack full of pounds of cherries and handed it to me! I was amazed and I said so. He spent all that time of his own picking cherries for me? I told him I would pick them, but he insisted and laughed, "Now is when the real work begins."

I laughed, too. Because last time I picked all those cherries, my sister-in-law pitted them. I just finished pitting them and it took me close to an hour. I have a two-quart pitcher full of pitted cherries now.

He talked about making jam and told me how. I'm a little freaked out about canning because I don't know what I'm doing and I don't want anything to explode or poison anyone.

I will handle them again tomorrow and probably freeze everything. What a nice surprise for my day!

Any ideas for using them up?