I bought cherries today. They appeared for the first time in my local Costco, and I scooped up a plastic crate of them so heavy and large, I can't imagine that I'll ever be able to eat them before they start to ferment. In my own defense, I hesitated before I bought them, the practical side of my brain pointing out the box was bigger than two or three of my heads. But cherries remind me of my grandparents, and so I bought them.

My maternal grandparents have always been very practical people. Salt of the earth Midwesterners not at all prone to extravagance, a trait I have absorbed into the very marrow of my bones. Treats were not reserved only for special occasions but were spaced far enough apart to make them special in and of themselves, capable of turning any old Wednesday into a shiny penny of a day. (To this day, I think that is the very, very best way to have treats.) And when a rare goody was pulled unexpectedly from the depths of the pantry or the fridge, it was a very fine moment, indeed.

In the early summer, it was an orange soda. Soda, at that time and in my family, was not readily available for every lunch and dinnertime beverage. Such a fine and valuable thing was not kept upstairs in the kitchen with all the normal foods but rather down in the basement in a cool, dry corner with the homemade preserves. Once in a blue moon at precisely noon while laying out the bologna sandwiches and little dishes of pickles and canned pears, my grandmother would say, "Why don't you go down and get a soda today?" I would take off at a sprint, more than willing to battle the boogie men who lived in the dark depths, in order to snatch up one of the brightly colored cans.

On Thursdays, the day after grocery shopping was always done, and when it was very, very hot, my grandmother might pull out of the fridge a nearly frozen Baby Ruth candy bar. Candy bars were even more rare than soda and, as every kid knew, even better cold. My grandmother knew this, too, and always put them in the "icebox" for me, even though it made the thin chocolate shell around the peanuts and nougat brittle and messy. With every bite, a shower of chocolate shards would trail down my face and t-shirt. I don't remember her following after me with a wet washcloth and a broom, but she must have.

In the fall and winter when she'd pull out her rolling pin and big canister of flour, turning her kitchen table into a baker's workshop, forming pie shells and filling them with apple and cherry and chocolate, she would save the unused trimmings of dough. And while I hovered like a baby bird around the fringes of all this activity, she'd lay them out on a cookie sheet and slide them in with the baking pie. Hot out of the oven, she'd drizzle the buttery, cookie-like strips with the pie filling or jam and put them into my sweaty little hands.

But the rarest and best treat of all happened only once a year. The very first time cherries showed up in the grocery store, my grandmother - a woman who counted every penny twice - would buy for me one bag of this fleeting and expensive fruit. Dark red and juicy, cherries always seemed to me, at all of eight years old, to be the dangerous temptress of the fruit world. If Greta Garbo were a fruit, she'd be a cherry. Dracula, too. Home with each berry scrupulously washed by my grandmother, I'd savor each one, spitting the pits into the aqua blue 1960s trash can, letting the flesh squish around between my teeth and the juice leak out between my lips.

It was the very best treat of all.