June Morning

June Morning

Growing up in the farmy lands of Honeoye Falls, New York, I applied for a worker’s permit when I turned 16 because I knew that was the only way I could buy the plaid kilt and bucket purse at Sibley’s that I passionately coveted. That June, I went to work at Kimball’s Farm on the outskirts of town where the strawberry fields really did stretch on forever.

We started picking at 7:30 and worked all day and the pay was ten cents a quart. I remember pulling on shorts, a t-shirt, and sneakers with holes in the toes…so sleepy, wanting only one more dream, wishing with all my heart there was an easier way to get that kilt. Possess that purse.

Taking the metal carrier with its ten empty quart baskets by the handle, I headed out into the fields. The air on a clear morning was sweet with the smell of plowed earth and ripe berries beginning to warm in the sun. The plants were drenched with dew, and the berries glowed like rubies hidden in a thick thrush of green.

At first, I would bend over to pick, slowly working my way down an everlasting row, searching for the reddest berries, plucking the stems, and piling the fruit in the little wooden baskets. Then so eager for water and a break, up to the stand with ten picked quarts and then back down to the field. Over and over until the blessed half hour for lunch up at the little white stand (a breezy oasis because it was cool and shady), and I relished the tiny packaged cherry pie in its foil tin that was the treat of the day.

After lunch, I picked sitting down, moving slower now down the row that seemed to end only where the earth curved into faraway, unknowable places like Paris, Manhattan, San Francisco. On someone’s transistor radio, Skeeter Davis was lamenting “The End of the World,” and Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet” croonings caught in the maple leaves up by the stand, and the “Rhythm of the Rain” colored my weary daydreams.

And late in the afternoon, coming home covered with dirt and sweat and berry stains, every muscle bone-tired, I knew I didn’t have the stamina of a farm girl, knew I had to find a way out and far from those plowed fields. I ate a lot of strawberries; I bought the kilt; and I left my town at 17. Now when I pick a quart of strawberries, it all comes back: the girl, the earth, the dew, the yearnings, and those June mornings when the strawberries beckoned and their rows ended in unimaginable horizons.