In our garden, there are two cherry trees. One has sweet cherries, the other sour cherries. One of my activities this summer was to pick those cherries and cook jam. While in one of the trees, I somehow started to wonder why I am spending my time on this: The cherries I was picking were quite small – so small that I could only remove their stones manually, one by one. I spent multiple evenings in the kitchen to ultimately end up with two glasses of jam (plus three glasses of “sauce”, because apparently I am too tight-fisted when it comes to adding sugar to would-be-jam). It took hours to pick the cherries and I could get more cherries, even locally produced ones, for a lower price at the supermarket. I only ended up picking the fruit in arms-reach (the proverbial low hanging fruit), and then even bought a tool to extend my reach so I can go further next year. It’s certainly not for economic reasons that I pick cherries.
When I started to pick cherries, I realized that there are not two cherry trees. No, there are seven (!) of them all around the house. It turns out that once you take an interest in them, you start seeing them everywhere. It did not take long to then learn that we do not actually have a sweet and a sour cherry tree, but rather one “cultivated” cherry tree and many wild ones – but all of them sweet.
One of the cherry trees is behind the garage, which is a space that I have not paid much attention to. It is overgrown, but from up in the tree you could actually see that if you cut out the existing bushes you would get a surprisingly large area back for the garden (or to extend the garage one day). Clearing that space is probably going to be a project for the fall.
Climbing into one of the trees gave me a new perspective on our house, looking at the roof. I ended up borrowing a ladder from my neighbor to clean out the rain gutter and found an old piece of cloth from the previous owner that clogged one of them. With the ladder, I then climbed on the house to look out over the tree-tops and see what the view would be like: we had debated whether to eventually put in a new window there, seeing the nice view is a good datapoint.
I then gave some of the nicer cherries that I picked to another neighbor, who returned the favor and presented us with some of the pak choy he had grown in the garden. We chatted and he ended up giving me valuable advice for how to go about repainting the fence (another one of my projects), plus a good number of new destinations around our home to explore by bike.
My quest to find a tool to effectively remove stones from really small cherries (they are too small for a regular destoning machine) lead me to visit all of the nearby stores that I had not really explored fully yet. This is how I learned that one store actually has many of the things I usually get from the somewhat distant hardware store, which is going to save me hours in the future.
I can’t help but notice the parallels between picking cherries and poking at (for example) the build code at work. Is the build system my main job? No. But it’s there, it’s around me, and that is apparently sufficient to be of interest to me. You notice the low hanging fruit that surround you (whatever is in reach) and you try to pick them. Learning, finding better tools, getting perspective, and making new friends is almost implicit in this, and that’s why it is worth doing.