Farm Work
You can smell the strawberries when you walk towards the field carrying your empty basket. I forget that every year, but as soon as I smell it I remember. And I forget how red everything gets. The basket, our hands, our knees, our clothes, the kids' mouths...
We got the idea to give strawberries to teachers for an end of year present. We found little dishes at the thrift store and made little tags - "You're sweet! Thanks for being my teacher." Then we went to go pick berries in probably the last week of the season.
Some years when we go it's too early and the berries are small and not many are ripe yet. Other years they are perfect and sweet and thick on the plants. We come home with boxes of them those years - one year I froze twenty pounds of perfect strawberries. This year we worked really hard to get hardly 3/4 of a box (about 10 pounds). They were small, but they were really sweet. We found most of them in the middle of the rows where people had passed them by. We covered a lot of rows and got not many berries. The kids started out cheerful, lost their cheerfulness and complained about the straw and the sun and the bugs, and then finished up with quiet resignation. They had forgotten their complaints by the time we got to the car with our big box of berries.
"Do you appreciate the fruit and vegetables that we buy at the store more now?" I asked.
"Huh?"
"Someone picks all those fruits and vegetables that we buy at the store. It's a lot of hard work, isn't it?"
"Well, yeah, but they at least get paid. We had to pay to do work," Anna said.
"Well, I paid for the berries," I said. "We get a reduced price since we picked them ourselves."
Anna still seemed skeptical.
The gifts for the teachers turned out really cute. We even had enough left over to make two fresh strawberry pies. They weren't cool last night when the kids went to bed. I promised them pie the next day. In fact, we had it for breakfast. I decided that fresh strawberry pie is just as nutritious as a donut and people eat donuts for breakfast all the time, right? And besides, it's the last day of school.
We got the idea to give strawberries to teachers for an end of year present. We found little dishes at the thrift store and made little tags - "You're sweet! Thanks for being my teacher." Then we went to go pick berries in probably the last week of the season.
Some years when we go it's too early and the berries are small and not many are ripe yet. Other years they are perfect and sweet and thick on the plants. We come home with boxes of them those years - one year I froze twenty pounds of perfect strawberries. This year we worked really hard to get hardly 3/4 of a box (about 10 pounds). They were small, but they were really sweet. We found most of them in the middle of the rows where people had passed them by. We covered a lot of rows and got not many berries. The kids started out cheerful, lost their cheerfulness and complained about the straw and the sun and the bugs, and then finished up with quiet resignation. They had forgotten their complaints by the time we got to the car with our big box of berries.
"Do you appreciate the fruit and vegetables that we buy at the store more now?" I asked.
"Huh?"
"Someone picks all those fruits and vegetables that we buy at the store. It's a lot of hard work, isn't it?"
"Well, yeah, but they at least get paid. We had to pay to do work," Anna said.
"Well, I paid for the berries," I said. "We get a reduced price since we picked them ourselves."
Anna still seemed skeptical.
The gifts for the teachers turned out really cute. We even had enough left over to make two fresh strawberry pies. They weren't cool last night when the kids went to bed. I promised them pie the next day. In fact, we had it for breakfast. I decided that fresh strawberry pie is just as nutritious as a donut and people eat donuts for breakfast all the time, right? And besides, it's the last day of school.
posted by Lea at 6:43 AM
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