Life is a bowl of cherries

June is the month that it really feels summer has arrived.  The pool water is deliciously good for swimming, the sun is abundant, and evenings, enlivened by the myriad fireflies that dance on the paths and bushes in the garden, long and time for conversations and making friendships.

In the garden the cherry trees both wild and cultivated are laden with bright red fruit.  How is it the birds know to head directly for the plump juicy cultivated cherries, leaving the smaller wild fruit to tumble to the floor.  We picked today, a cherry cake made for breakfast and soon to be made a cherry ricotta pie for dinner this evening.  The fruit for this are currently marinading in a wee drop of brandy.  

After a ‘fruitless’ season last year, a late frost robbed us of all but a few September figs.  This year is a huge contrast, we are so so happy,  all the fruit trees are all laden, branches already pendulous with ripening fruit..  Plums, Apricots, Apples, Medlars, Damsons Figs will all go to make jams for our breakfast table, whilst the Quinces make a ruby red jelly and the delicious Cotognata – real slow cooked quince paste, so good as an accompaniment with the local pecorino.  Sloes, Damsons and Walnuts and maybe for the first time as a trial, also Apricots, will be put under alcohol to make liqueurs to be quaffed after dinners at our terrace table.  More of those stories later.

Of course, our infinity pool beckons.  The sun loungers, capacious and comfortable, shaded by pastel pink umbrellas look out over the infinity pool to the Apeninnes and way off Sibyline mountains, the views are huge and tranquil.  Space to breathe, soak up the sun and swim as naked as the day we were born, it is a delight.