Picking Strawberries

So, Tom hurt himself (shhhhh, he doesn’t want me to tell anyone) and so he’s been kind of down for the count for about a week. He slammed his shoulder into the corner of an archway and yeah, he’s broken.

The day before he hurt himself, my mom invited us over to pick strawberries. She’s got a bad knee and so picking berries or any kind of gardening is kind out for her right now. She, because she’s smart, been to the doctor and is doing the things necessary to hopefully get better.

Tom…because he’s a stubborn dude, hasn’t seen a doctor but I made him start wearing a sling about three days after his injury. We’ll see how that goes.

Anyway. We picked strawberries on a Saturday. The following Tuesday afternoon I got home from work and the first thing Olivia asks me if if we can go to Gram’s.

I kind of shrug and say I don’t really want to.

But Tom pipes up with the suggestion that we do go to Gram’s because those strawberries aren’t going to pick themselves.

Sigh.

I hate picking strawberries.

I hate gardens in general because they’re so much work. There’s the planting, the weeding, the harvesting, the preserving of the harvest.

Ugh. So much work.

Alas, I am currently the only able-bodied adult in our immediate family and so the strawberry picking falls to me.

Tom instructed Alyssa to help…and she did, to a point.

But she’s a teenager, she doesn’t have a lot of gardening experience. She wandered around the strawberry patch, picking the occasional berry that caught her eye. She didn’t stop and bend and move the leaves of the plants and find all the berries that hide beneath the plants. And it’s fine. I didn’t tell her to do any of that.

About a half hour into our picking spree, she declared she was done. I think she might have swallowed a bug or touched a spider or something but she was completely over being outside in a strawberry patch. I made her trade bowls with me since mine was three-quarters full and hers was…not.

And to be fair to her, she’d been outside all day at high jump camp. She was tired too.

I picked for another twenty minutes or so, through my mom coming out onto her deck to yell that I could be done if I wanted to.

Yeah, except too bad for me, there were still berries to be picked.

All I could think about when I thought about quitting was that if Tom or my mom were out there and able to pick those stupid berries, neither of them would stop picking until there wasn’t a single ripe berry left to be picked.

Those two put the rest of us schlumps to shame. Their work ethic makes me feel like a lazy schmuck who never puts in a full day of work.

Which…isn’t necessarily wrong, but I don’t like to be made to feel like that. I mean, I fully admit to being lazy but it’s awful to be reminded of it on a regular basis.

But hey, to end on a positive note, since I sweated my ass off in a strawberry patch for over 45 minutes, bending and stretching and kneeling and wheezing, I didn’t have to drag my big, lazy butt out and walk that evening. Look at me, always looking for the bright side.