The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir by Josh Kilmer-Purcell

Agway wearing my high school prom tux and the person behind me in line would still just bitch about the rain.
    To celebrate all of our new “uncool” friends, and to thank them for all their help in getting the Beekman back up and running, we decided to throw our very first party a few months after we’d moved in. Brent had planned for it to be an old-fashioned Fourth of July picnic, Martha-style, with bunting on the porch, grass-fed hamburgers, sparklers, and, to top it all off, a cherry pie from the cherries of our very own tree.
    We’d watched all spring as the old cherry tree in the backyard grew heavier and heavier with ripening fruit. Two weekends before the Fourth, I followed the advice of someone I’d met in line at Agway (of course, where else?) and purchased a large roll of black plastic bird netting. It wasn’t easy to cover the twenty-foot tree, but Brent and I finished it late the previous Sunday evening. We knew that by the time the holiday came around, the tree would be laden with jewel-red fruit, unscathed by the flocks of birds that called the Beekman their home.
    “I think we should crank our own ice cream to put on the cherry pie,” Brent mused on the train trip up to the Beekman that long holiday weekend.
    “I don’t think we’re going to have time to make our own ice cream,” I said. “The cherry tree is loaded. Most of the weekend will be spent picking, pitting, and freezing them.”
    “Oh, that can’t take more than a couple of hours,” Brent said.
    “Look at my palms,” I said, holding them out for his inspection. “See how white they are?”
    Brent, not knowing exactly where this was heading but equally certain that I was about to make a pointless point, rolled his eyes.
    “They were permanently bleached from pitting sour cherries, day after day after day, when I was a child. One tree will give buckets and buckets of cherries.”
    “Your hands were not permanently bleached,” he sighed.
    “They’re awfully white, aren’t they?”
    “Yes, you’re suffering from a very rare case of reverse melanoma.” In his capacity as house doctor, Brent frequently diagnosed me with terminal cancer just to get me to quit complaining. When I do finally die, I plan to do so writhing in pain and bleeding from all orifices, simply to spite him.
    “Plus this is the weekend we said we’d clean out the hayloft, weed the flower garden, and trellis the beans,” I said. “By the time the party rolls around, we’ll be exhausted. Let’s just buy ice cream.”
    “That’s not very Martha Stewart Entertaining,” he said.
    “I think two gay city boys trying to light a grill will be entertaining enough for them.”

    First thing Saturday morning, having been awoken to the usual Wagner/Madonna/Sinatra rooster medley, we grabbed two buckets from the barn and headed out to the cherry tree.
    “Wow. It’s loaded,” Brent said. The branches were bent to the ground, weighted down with the most beautiful sprays of ruby red globes. Brent reached through the netting, picked a cherry, and popped it in his mouth, then quickly spit it out. “They’re not ripe yet,” he said. “They’re still really sour.”
    “They’re supposed to be,” I explained. Having grown up in the South, Brent was used to sweet cherries. Where I lived, only sour cherry trees would survive the winter. “They’re sour cherries. For pies. And jellies. You can’t eat them raw.”
    “Blech.” He spit out the remaining unchewed pieces.
    “I read online that they’re one of Martha’s favorite pie varieties,” I said, completely lying. “Now help me get this netting off.”
    He walked to the other side of the tree and began tugging at the black netting. We struggled for a good half hour before the netting finally landed in a tangled heap of snagged leaves and branches on the ground next to the base of the tree.
    And then it began to move.
    Random corners of the billowy netting were flapping and fluttering at our feet. I