Cherries

My husband and I both have cherry tattoos on our wedding ring fingers. It is quite a piece of art on my husband's calloused, chapped sausage fingers. It draws a lot of attention to have something so dainty on his masculine hands, so this is the story of the cherries. The story of us.

My husband and I met when I was 16. We had met through friends and often saw each other at social gatherings of those friends. When I was 19, home for the summer from my freshman year of college, we went on our first date, which was to a car show. I had ridden in his vehicles over the years with friends, many of those vehicles were Jeeps that he had rebuilt. On that first date, he explained the name he picked out for his car club, The Cherry Picker's Car Club. He didn't have any members to this car club, but he had a name.

The Cherry Picker's Car Club is a play on words. A cherry picker is what is used to pull a motor out of a vehicle, but it also means that you can pick out a “cherry” of a car. The “cherry” being the best of the best. Wandering around the car show on that hot August day, I picked out the “cherry”, which was a 1951 Mercury with a custom grill.

After that first car show, we were married 15 months later. My husband clarified his Cherry Picker's Car Club membership requirement, which was that we would make all the members. Our children would drive their namesake vehicles in our car club.

The tattoos came throughout our first two years of marriage, but for our tenth anniversary we extended the tattoos to include the cherry blossom. We found “cherries” in each other, but the blossom represents years together. The cherries came first, which is the harvest season when everything is plentiful, but the blossom represents the new life after all the cherries have died through the winter. It represents the seasons we have been through together, and the season we are in now.

All the symbolism throughout the years is really quite something. We have collected cars for over a decade; we have used cars to name our children; we have used cars as signs, which is how we bought our farm; we used cars to find each other. The cherries are quite appropriate, even when we are old and have the most wrinkly hands.