If I was making a list of my anchors in Place (physical locations), I would probably include Morning Shade Farm. I have been picking berries on this particular U-Pick farm most summers for a very long time. Because the west side of Morning Shade runs adjacent to my uncle’s farm, which was my grandfather’s before him, I have been returning to this corner of rural Oregon for my entire life and my internal compass resonates when I crouch into the shade of a blueberry plant, picking into my bucket on a dry, hot summer day.
I don’t know when Morning Shade began its U-Pick operation, but I have a 30+ year old? memory of picking over there with my parents and siblings on a summer evening when I was in college. or was it five-ish years later, during the summer I came home from Kentucky while my brother was getting chemo treatment for his cancer and we stayed with my grandfather? I don’t know, but I remember that, as if by special neighborly arrangement, we were the only ones over there picking in the evening as the sun went down. Though the details are not clearly logged into my memory, what for sure is true is that the folks who run the place are good and kind people, a fact that has not faded even as the farm has scaled up to an extensive operation that now offers an event venue, along with all the regular berries, apples, varieties of other fruits, cider and juices, and even canned goods. Last week when I was there they had baked items for sale.
When my boys were little I took them to the farm multiple times a summer. They roamed the rows, picking berries into their mouth and sometimes into their buckets. They splashed in the puddles made by sprinklers during dry Oregon summers. They investigated caterpillars, ladybugs, and other field critters. They patted the farm dogs. They stood at a distance watching bees fly around the hive boxes. Sometimes our friends from Bend would join us for a picking day and then the farm became even more of an adventure, the kids together out exploring the fields. In the fall we picked apples.
Later, during the nearly ten years we lived in Alaska, I always stopped by Morning Shade Farm on our summer time trips to Oregon, picking pounds of blueberries to carry home on the plane. When we visited Oregon in the fall, the boys and I went to Morning Shade to pick apples to carry back with us.
Long gone are the days when my little boys went with me to the farm. Now they are young men who walk through the kitchen on a summer morning and eat my work by the handfuls. I don’t know where their memories lie, but I suspect it is not in the actual act of berry picking since they did very little of that. But I still access mine there. And so when summer in Oregon comes around and I am able, I go to pick berries.
Which is what I was doing last Wednesday morning on a perfect picking day. The fields were fairly quiet, being midweek, overcast and cool, and the berries were ripe for super easy picking. I had been at it for a couple hours, listening to a book through my earbuds, and collecting full buckets with the work of my hands when I noticed a little boy, maybe 4 years old, walking down the row next to me. Here’s a blue berry!! he exclaimed (there were many blue berries). I watched him pick it and drop it into his small pail while his mother encouraged him from several bushes away, Good!! pick some for daddy! His younger sister came up beside him and joined in picking off a few more blue berries before the two of them wandered from that bush to another. I went back to my picking.
A minute or two later I heard, LOOK! They have dandelions too!!! Oh. My. Goodness. Little boys are cat nip for me. I turned and watched as this kid picked a dandelion and gave it to his sister who accepted it with actual gratitude. And then he picked another and took it to his mother, tucking it into the purse that was slung around her shoulder.
Everybody went back to picking for a couple more minutes and then the little boy had to go to the bathroom. The three of them turned to pick their way back out of the field and I watched them go.
Remembering.
Life is Just A bowl of Cherries