I spent my Memorial Day a little differently than most people in America. You see, Memorial Day kicks off a very special season for my mom and me: berry-picking season.
So on my day off, I woke to my alarm at 5:30 a.m., scooped up my one-year-old boys for sleeping in the car, and headed out about 100 miles to my grandparents’ farm. I love going there. To me, my grandparent’s farm is a place of simplicity, hard work and unconditional love—and I’m reminded of those important values when I visit.
As we pulled into the long dirt road headed to the farmhouse, I could already see my mom in her bonnet, hunched over first row of blackberry bushes.
The bushes are thick and strong. Planted over fifty years ago, their roots run deep and it’s rare to not have a large crop of blackberries. Over the next month, my mom (and I when I can help) will pick over 20 gallons off these vines.
One of my favorite parts of berry-picking is getting dressed. I head into the farmhouse to that all-too-familiar closet and bring out one of my grandmother’s old bonnets. When I was little, I remember thinking about how crazy she looked in them. But now, three years after she passed away, nothing brings me more joy. I take out one of her long-sleeved shirts—so thin you can almost see through them—and frazzled up and down the arms where she’d battled the blackberries’ thorns.
I scoop up my bucket and join my mom in the first row. “You look just like Lenora in the making,” she says. And I couldn’t feel more proud.
I nestle down in the dirt and the picking begins—my mom on one side of the row and me on the other. We chat about things in our lives and swat the flies away from our faces. I couldn’t be happier.
For the first thirty minutes, that is.
By now the sun is coming up and it’s hotter than I remember last year being. I start to sweat and it mixes in with the dirt, thick on my jeans. I start to feel mud between my toes as it has sunk into my shoes and socks.
The thorns are brutal. I find a long stick to help me lift branches in search of berries hiding the middle of the bushes. The berries are so sweet and delicious; missing even one would be a shame. Every 60 seconds I let out a yelp and after two hours, my hands look and feel like they’ve been stabbed a hundred times with teeny, tiny purple daggers. My mom hasn’t uttered a single sigh of pain, but a quick glance shows the hundreds of tiny pieces of skin hanging off her hands—twice as bad as mine.
As I scoot along the ground, dead branches—whose thorns have gotten dry and hard—stab me in the bottom as the flies buzz around my sweating face.
I think a lot while I pick—mostly about my family who grew up on this farm and about the way farming is now. I think about the blackberry bushes you can plant now that are genetically-modified to have no thorns. I think about how my mom has lovingly pulled weeds from these bushes throughout the year by hand—just waiting for this month to come.
By the end of my third hour, I feel hot and exhausted. My hands ache and I’m generally miserable. But as I head into the house for a glass of water, I pause and give a handful of berries to both my boys and watch them gobble them up as purple juice runs down their face—and I feel amazing and proud. A fourth generation is enjoying the results of my family’s labor. Fruit grown with love, respect, and hard work. Fruit with a soul.
I think about fruit in the grocery store. Does this fruit have a soul?
Most likely the fruit you buy was genetically-modified into a form God never intended. It was sprayed with chemicals, picked when it was green in a different state or country thousands of miles away, then sprayed with more chemicals in route to ripen it for the grocery store. It was most likely put through a radiation process to kill any potentially harmful organisms. And any fruit that wasn’t completely aesthetically perfect was thrown into the garbage. Does this fruit have a soul? Do you feel joy when you eat it?
Please visit your local farmer’s market. Talk with the farmers and learn about their practices. See if they’ve grown your food with love and respect. And if you don’t find a farmer’s market, please buy organically—crops that are not genetically-modified and are tended to with hard work, rather than harmful chemicals.
Choose foods that have a soul. Support the farmers that work so hard every day to create foods that are the way God intended—because let me tell you, after only three hours of mild berry-picking I can tell you that it’s not an easy way to live. Support the love, hard work, and respect these farmers put into the land. You’ll get so much more joy out of eating.
Simply,
