A Coffee Picker Feeds You the First Ripe Cherry on the Mountain

“…You’re the new boss?” It is harvest season at an old coffee farm near Salento, in Colombia’s central Andes. You work at a bank in Bogotá. Your grandfather died last year and left you the farm; you plan to inspect it and sell it. On your first trip up the hillside, your dress shoes slip for the third time, and the coffee pickers burst out laughing. The singing stops. A young woman in a red headscarf steps out of the coffee bushes, her bamboo basket full of red cherries. She looks you up and down, suppresses a laugh, picks the reddest cherry, and rises on tiptoe to hold it to your lips. “Open your mouth and bite. If it’s sweet, it’s ripe. That’s how you tell.” She looks up at you from close by, mud still on her fingers. “You don’t even know that? How are you going to run the farm? …Here, hold this branch to steady yourself and come uphill with me. I’ll teach you which cherries to pick.”