Cherries...

Washington state is know for many things - apples, Microsoft, Boeing, serial killers, Cascades, Mt. St. Helen's and cherries, to mention a few. My friend at work is working very diligently to get me to like cherries. There are two type grown here- Bing Cherries and Rainier Cherries. Rainier cherries are yellow and red - very tasty, with white insides. Bing are sold all across the country and are dark red, with a red insides, slightly tart.

I don't like cherries that much. When I was a kid I was allergic to "red dye #7" or whatever the red dye that they pulled from the market in the early 80's because it was toxic. When I would eat artificially flavored cheery things I would break out into hives. Thus by association I don't like them. (Oddly though, one of my few memories of my grandmother was her sitting at our kitchen table in West Virginia, smoking a cigarette, taking the pits out of cherries so she could make cherry pies...) But I'm trying to be open to them. I had a friend in the Peace Corps who threatened not to be my friend because I couldn't stand olives. Truly, it was because I had been exposed solely to the little canned black ones that you put on your fingers and made puppets with. I also didn't like salty things. Now I love olives. I found the right olives to love.

So I'm trying to start a new relationship with cherries. It's not as hard as with olives because I love fruit. But it's still one of the last ones I would choose. My friend it trying to move cherries up... from 23 rd on my list to like 8. We'll see how it goes.