I spent every summer of my childhood from the age of 8 through 15 working in the fields of the Skagit Valley. Every kid in the valley started with catching the “berry bus” first thing in the morning. That dusty, rumbling retired school bus filled with sleepy faces and brown bag lunches heading to the next ripe field. Our punch cards hung around our necks ready to be filled with little holes indicating our efforts so we could get paid every Friday. Nothing like the feeling of a fresh card! We were assigned a row, fell to our knees, and reached our little fingers into the dew painted leaves. Slugs, dirt clods, wet sticky fingers filled our morning. Every flat, 12 square boxes in a plastic rectangle, slowly filled on “jam berry” days while the fields filled with the giant retail berries filled in no time at all. Those were so fun to pick (and eat…. shhhhh). By the time the horn blew for lunch we were sweaty with our jackets tied around our waist, the dewy morning long gone.
We would head for the dusty bus on wobbly legs that had been folded beneath us for three or four hours, feet tingling as they woke up. The big jug of water on the tailgate of the pickup truck of the field supervisor was the first stop before heading to the line for the honey bucket. Finally we could get to the bus and grab our crinkled brown bag filled with bologna sandwiches, fritos, and a hostess cupcake or snowball. I lined my limp sandwich with the crunchy chips and nothing could taste better.
After a few more hours of picking we shuffled back into the bus for the long ride home. Purple fingers, dust covered shoes, and sunburned noses ready to get home so we could wrap our newspapers and get to our paper routes. That’s a story for another day.
These are the memories evoked from this vintage berry flat. I found this a few years ago at an antique store and loved it immediately. Though we hated picking berries as children, the work ethic, discipline and experience are now a bit nostalgic nearly 50 years later. I was thinking about painting it after using it to store the little miscellaneous supplies in my studio. I think I may stencil it with strawberries 🙂
