When we were young and in Grade School, we were taught, during music classes, some of Canada's patriotic songs, along with what was then termed "Negro spirituals", English folk songs and American ones as well. Among them was the folk song about Charming Billy and the cherry pie his beloved who was too young to leave her mother, was able to bake as quick as a cat could blink its eye.

Funny thing that; how quick can one possibly bake a cherry pie, after all, since the time-consuming task of de-stemming and pitting come first? I used to have a really neat little gadget that made pitting the stones of cherries quick work. Unfortunately, I am one of the world's lamentable klutzes, and I tend to either break or lose useful items. I have long since given up on that little pitter, and have never found a replacement. My right thumbnail is employed now for that purpose.

Not that I bake cherry pies all that often. But since cherries are now in season and plentiful, aside from eating them as is, the occasional cherry pie seems called for. When we were young, living in our first flat and I was first experimenting with baking I'd baked a cherry pie, and in transporting it from the oven to the table where it was meant to cool I slipped and believe me cherry pie filling, hot and juicy and sticky cast about everywhere in a kitchen makes an awful mess.

Much later, in our second house, where we raised our children from their teen years into adulthood we had planted a Manchu cherry bush. It grew to maturity, had delightful flowers in early spring which burly bees just adored, and eventually it produced cherries. That bush occasioned us the wherewithal for a good share of cherry pies.

Time and age have taught me some elements of caution, but not overwhelmingly so; though I've never dashed another fruit pie over my kitchen, I do keep misplacing, losing or breaking pottery, kitchen utensils and other such items. I thought of that old English Billy-Boy tune while I was pitting the cherries. My husband offered to do the pitting; I demurred. He offered to "stand by me", which is to say beside me at the kitchen sink and share the de-stoning task with me, but I laughed him off.

Unlike the Little Red Hen story where no one offered to help in planting, gathering and threshing the wheat to bake the bread, however, this pie will be offered up for my husband's delectation  -- a loving gift from me to him.