One day every year, dad would come into our bedroom at daybreak and say get up and get your clothes on..we are going huckle-berry picking today....all the boys slept in their shirt-tails .... we did not have underwear as it was not an absolute necessity..so we were ready in a little while..we had some breakfast and then we all wrapped our legs from our shoes almost to our knees with old rags......Dad took turpentine and dabbed it all over the rags..he said snakes wont come around if they smell turpentine... every kid that was old enough to pick went along and we we were like gypsies, walking over toward the mountain.Ernest was the oldest one in our group...he was almost a man then....the place where we picked berries we called the yellow ledges..huge rock bluffs in the woods.....we all got to the river where the Interstate RR had a trestle across the river close to our old swimmin hole...it was a long trestle and we had to walk across it quickly so a train would not hit us..Dad would lay his ear on the rail and listen for a train..then he said. lets go....after crossing the river, we went about 600 ft. to a swale in the woods and went up that swale on up, up, up the mountain where we started picking.....blueberries & huckleberries are not the same..blueberries grow close to the ground and huckleberry vines sometimes reach 5 feet high....my sister, Aileen and me picked together and we sat our big bucket on the ground and picked I a little Karo syrup pail and then emptied it into the big bucket...we picked for about 2 hours and we moved to a new area....I was carrying the big bucket and Aileen said, whats that yellow stuff on your pants?.the bucket had been sitting on a yellow-jackets nest and when I picked it up, they swarmed all over me..I ran through the bushes swatting my pants and finally got rid of them..I did NOT get stung!..Ernest had picked two 2-gallon buckets full and all of us filled our buckets and started back home...got to the river and we all crossed the trestle but Ernest..he took a short-cut across the foot-rocks where we had dammed up the river to create the swimming hole...a rock turned with him and he fell in, spilling both 2-gallon buckets of berries in the river...he was trying to catch them floating away and he cried like a baby, even though he was grown...we emptied the berries into a number 2 wash tub at home and almost filled the tub...then we picked the un-ripe berries and twigs out so Mom could can them.......
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 14:23:39 +0000
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