At 95, Miss Roberta has been working on her raspberry patch for over 60 years. It is enormous. Raspberries were her only cash crop back when she was a school principal and her husband raised bees. She is still proud of keeping her raspberry customers happy, but for the last few years she has done very little picking and this year she stopped entirely. At 95, she’s not very steady. So the way she keeps her raspberry customers happy is that two other ladies and I pick the berries for her.
Roberta has, without a doubt, the best raspberry patch in the valley. She doesn’t let anyone near this patch except the three of us, and it’s an honor to be able to help. (Roberta’s raspberry patch is like Tom Sawyer’s fence. A neighbor asked me, How come you get to pick them? I’ve been trying to get in there for years.) Ruth picks with a lard bucket belted to her waist, which leaves both hands free. I use a belt from Roberta’s dead husband to strap on my bucket (gone these past sixteen years but still helping out) and we start picking around 8AM every Tuesday and Friday morning. It takes a few hours for us to clear the patch, and we take home half of what we pick.
At peak production the patch was producing over 30 pints a picking, but today we picked 15. Since we get half and Roberta sells berries at $5/pint, we earned about $10/hour in berries for two hours work. We pretend that we do this because Miss Roberta’s raspberries are beyond compare… and they are. But the real reason we pick her berries is because she’s too old to do it herself. It’s a mitzvah. She was once the fastest picker around, and it’d make her crazy to let them rot.
When we finish up, Roberta is down the road irrigating her vegetable garden. (She won’t take her cane and everyone clucks, but so be it.) I stop by to report how many pints we picked and where I left her share, and we discuss the state of the walnut crop, the virtues of sheepnose apples vs. strawberry apples, and her raspberry customers.
They’re not like you and me, she said. They don’t eat bowls of berries with cream. They just sprinkle a few on their cereal for breakfast. Can you imagine? Mixing berries with cereal? And she laughs as I shake my head in dismay.
At 95, she knows that life is much too short to mix berries with anything but cream.
how touching….and I’m in Ms Robertas’ camp….berries and cream !!!
What lovely vignettes and thoughts. Another vote for berries and cream! Reading you is like starting the day with a friend over a steaming cup of coffee.
Raspberries are the fruit of heaven - you are very lucky!
I am so jealous! I have a 50′ x 100′ lot, with a pretty big house and two sheds stuck right in the middle. I barely have room for anything. I used to have blackberries… but they just took up too much space, so I had to cut them back.
Enjoy them! I’ve paid $4.99/pint on occasion around here! (out of season, anyway.)
actually, that was supposed to be $4.99/ half pint. It’s a little flat plastic pack, one layer thick…