Iife is just a......

In basketball, sometime people, instead of covering their opposing player tightly, will “camp out” under the goal in hopes of picking up the easy rebound. This method is rather looked down on and is borderline cheating, because it is a cop out to playing good defense and competing for the rebound after the shot. The often used term for this type of play is “cherry picking” because it’s easy and lazy, the player doing it is termed “cherry picking” when they get the unopposed rebound.
As I balanced, on top of a ladder placed in the back of a pick-up parked on a slight incline, I wobbled back and forth while clinging to a branch far above my head, I wondered why people think cherry picking is so easy. Yeah, you don’t have the prickles, pain and bloodied fingers of blackberry and raspberry picking but instead you have scratching branches, precarious perches and long falls. Even after you finally get the cherries picked you have to remove the pits before you can use them, and let me tell you, it is not rare at all to be eating a delicious home made cherry pie and have it ruined by biting into a malicious pit.
Anyway, we have a big cherry tree in our backyard; ever since we’ve had ducks to keep the bugs off of them and bees to help with pollination we have also had a good cherry crop. The thing is, the tree is a good 50 ft high, ladders can not achieve the angle necessary to reach the upper branches, the ones containing the best cherries, and we don’t have a cherry picker truck. Over the years we pick all we can reach from the ground and try not to look up, at the many clusters of fruit, mocking us from branches just out of our reach. This year we discovered that we could park the truck under the tree and elevate our reach a bit more by standing in the bed. Later we put our 14ft ladder in the back of the truck as well, reaching us even more luscious berries. We, in our inventive ways, keep getting closer to the top, though we are still a long way off. It is not that safe though, I noticed, as I dangled off a ladder I had half tied to the thin branches of the tree, as there were no branches thick enough to actually support the ladder fully. I leaned back to grab a branch and pull in down to my level, the handle of the bucket held between my teeth, and noticed that the bottom of the ladder was no longer on the ground and a flimsy rope and a few thin branches were all that were holding me 20 ft in the air.

After finding my way down the tree I questioned whether the Indians and their method of cutting a tree full of ripe fruit down and harvesting it from the ground is not a better method? I doubt I can convince my mother of this, however.