Two years ago, I tasted my first fresh-off-the-tree sour cherry. It was early June. Al and Erna Beckmeyer’s Montmorency cherry trees - the largest more than half a century old - were laden with a bumper crop of sour cherries.

Like the Chardonel, Norton and Chambourcin wine grapes grown by their son Orion and his wife, Barbara Beckmeyer, on their adjacent farm, Al and Erna’s Montmorency "cherry pie" sour cherries must be harvested at the moment of peak ripeness. When that moment arrives, the word goes out over the Hartsburg hills and bottoms to come pick as soon as possible - before eager birds impatient to feast on the tempting red fruit strip the branches clean.

That first year, I picked cherries off branches so heavy with fruit that they touched the ground and climbed ladders to reach the sun-kissed, reddest, sweetest cherries at the top of the tree. During the course of a morning, Barbara and I shared news and exchanged ideas on what to do with our harvest. With noon approaching, I drove home with five large plastic ice cream containers filled with juicy cherries nested in the bed of my cherry red Chevy pickup truck.

In the two years that have passed since my first harvest from Erna and Al’s trees, I’ve planted four Montmorency cherry trees - one at Breakfast Creek, two in New Mexico and one in what is now an orchard in progress at Boomerang Creek. Forty cherries - this spring’s first crop on our young cherry tree - are an encouraging start but not nearly what is needed for a pie. When Barbara called last week and said it was once again cherry-picking time, I gathered containers and drove over without hesitation.

Pickers had stripped two small trees the day before, but the old parent tree stood waiting for anyone with time to spare. Orion set up ladders, then left me to my morning’s meditation. For the next two hours, I was alone with the birds and the bees while the morning sun warmed my freckled shoulders and an occasional breeze cooled the sweat beading along my brow.

From atop a tall ladder, I had a bird’s-eye view of the shiny corrugated Beckmeyer Farm grain bins just across the road. Beyond them, hills roll gently toward the Missouri River as it winds its way toward Jefferson City. Three of the bins were deconstructed and trucked up from the Hartsburg Bottoms after the Flood of 1993 knocked them catawampus. Then, on a night I will always remember, a dance was staged under a full August moon on the giant circles of concrete flooring poured in preparation for two additional bins.

When I’d finished picking, I stopped in to visit with Erna and shared a bowl of broccoli soup her daughter Janet had made the day before. Then it was time to drive home and get to work.

Picking, for anyone familiar with this heartland summer tradition, is just the first step in the labor-intensive journey one must be willing to undertake before cherries can be canned as a jam or preserve, boiled and reduced to a bounce or baked and latticed into a pie. Pitting - an arduous, time-consuming, one-cherry-at-a-time, hand-eye coordination-challenging, juice-all-over-the-place operation - comes next.

I’d harvested three large bowls to the brim with cherries. A deep-dish cherry pie takes 4-5 cups of the fruit. My base of operation was the kitchen sink, where I positioned one bowl of cherries, a dish for the pits and a large measuring cup to receive the pitted cherries.

Two hours later, I had a pile of cherry pits and approximately eight cups of pitted cherries - enough for two small pies or 1½ deep-dish pies.

For the pie, I turned to a classic recipe from Michigan, where 75 percent of the nation’s sour cherries are grown annually. It was a beauty, shared that evening with Louise Dusenbery - our neighbor from Breakfast Creek years - and Charlie, Danny and Emily at the Turtle Club in Ashland where they cook and serve delicious meals for others every day of the week except Sundays.

Sour cherries are pucker-up treasures of summer guaranteed to taste sweeter if baked in a pie shared with friends.