No. 170

"Cherry of a Dry" Cherry juice on watercolor paper. Around this time every year, our cherry tree provides a beautiful bounty of sour pie cherries. My 7th grade son who could be described as an amateur tree climber, can scurry up and down a tree like no one else I know. Anyway, it is his job to pluck the cherries from the tree. This was a good year for cherries. You have to time it just right so that the cherries are ripe enough but not too ripe that the birds strip the tree before we can harvest the cherries. My son picked as many cherries as he could reach and we proceeded to pit them using corn cob holders. The same son that climbs the trees is also a speed demon at pitting cherries. He can out pit me 3 to 1. We used some of the cherries to make a pie this evening and we froze the remainder for use in future pies during the Summer. The dry fly was painted using cherry juice and a few smashed cherries as a brush. I had to use Marachino cherry juice, because the fresh cherry juice does not have enough color to it.