There is nothing like local strawberries. Red all the way through, sweet and juicy, a completely different fruit from the West Coast ones we get here in the winter. We rode our bikes up to Amans Farm Market yesterday and brought home a couple quarts. I didn’t see any local cherries there and that got me thinking. I always thought the cherries came before the strawberries.
That notion was fixed a long time ago when I was 14 or 15. I know school was still in session and a farm on Ridge Road, just outside of the village of Webster, was hiring kids to pick cherries. I had to get a work permit and that’s when I got my social security card. I already had a paper route for years but somehow they got around all the labors laws with paperboys.
Picking cherries after school was a great job. You got paid by how much you picked so it was solid work experience At that time we’d climb the trees with a bucket in our hands and climb down when it was full. Today they have figured out a way to keep the trees low to the ground so you don’t need a ladder or anything. I remember someone had a transistor radio up in the trees and we’d be listening to our favorite songs on WBBF and WSAY and eating as many cherries as we could. I think my brother ate too many and got sick on them or maybe that was me.
Once the cherries were all picked and school was out we were offered jobs picking strawberries out in the hot sun. It was brutal. I quit.
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for us, it was mulberry trees. The mulberries were black as blood and stained our mouths, bare hands, bare feet. The blood of the God Pyramus was once turned into mulberry bushes. Because he died for love of Thisbee. Bet you didn’t know that. No similar info on the strawberry.