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Definition work is the work we are always doing.
Marissa W. Chen lives in New York and often visits clumps of weeds in the park. She finds and collects ephemera on IG @marissawchen.
Definition work is the work we are always doing.
Marissa W. Chen lives in New York and often visits clumps of weeds in the park. She finds and collects ephemera on IG @marissawchen.
MWC 2020: 08-2020
CHERRY SEASON
BY MARISSA W. CHEN
MWC 2020: 08-2020
Doris Lee, Siesta, 1944; Oil on canvas, 27 x 36 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of the Honorable Clare Boothe Luce; © Estate of Doris Lee, Courtesy of D. Wigmore Fine Art, Inc.; Photo by Lee Stalsworth
The money tree died a while back. It might have been May, definitely well before the end of July. I had spent those months eating cherries and had missed it completely.
There were the days I would lie on my stomach in bed, reading and eating cold cherries from the fridge. Ill-advised, I told myself. One after one I’d pluck their stems off and pop them whole in my mouth, rolling the pits around with my tongue and scraping off the excesses until clean.
I once accidentally swallowed a pit. Blinked in surprise as it slipped down my throat. I thought then that maybe I shouldn’t be eating cherries like this anymore.
As the months slipped on the price of cherries went up. They were $3.99 per pound at the higher end supermarket, then $4.99 per pound, then a whopping $6.99 per pound (I still bought them anyway, it was insane, I know). The fruit stand on the corner, the one in front of the CVS, stayed even at $3 per pound, but I rarely had cash on me during those days. I could have gone to the greenmarket but I didn’t know when cherry season was supposed to be on the east cost and felt embarrassed not knowing, so I never looked it up. It was mid-June and I still couldn’t bring myself to get on the subway. That would change in a few weeks.
Then, in the second week of August, I bought a $6.99 per pound bag of cherries at the supermarket (1.83 pounds) and was so disappointed I wasted almost the whole bag (money I did not have). They were waxy, saccharine, cough syrup. These weren’t the cherries I’d been in love with all summer, the ones that had gotten me through endless days looping in circles around the reservoir, hot stupefying evenings in front of the fan, the weeks in a partial quarantine limbo, stretching on and on without form.
I’d denied its last gasps for so long, and then there it was: the money tree, cherry season, they were the same thing. I got on the subway the next day.