From "Picking Grapes"

From "Picking Grapes", a Memoir

Yes I picked grapes for nearly ten hours at age eight with my dad at a wealthy homeowner's property. They seemed kind. They had an English Sheepdog. We weren't picking the grapes for the homeowners. We were picking them so my dad and one our neighbors who'd just purchased a liquor license together could make their own wine.

I can say at the time as well many years later I hadn't known anyone to pick fruit or any other gardened product till about 30 years later when I met the Grandfather of UltraRunning, Ted Corbitt. Ted and I chatted for over two hours in his Manhattan 9th floor apartment. He told me that he'd been born on a cotton farm in South Carolina.

Ted, a brilliant, kind soul told me he'd picked cotton for the first time when he was about age ten. He said his mom could out-pick anyone in picking cotton. Well over 100lbs of cotton in an hour with regularity. Although I hadn't known much of picking cotton on that day over twenty years ago; however, I knew that cotton picking was brutal. The barbs on the cotton plants could rip your skin apart, as the thorns of raspberry picking were not even close to the brutality of the barbs on the cotton plants. Never mind the other physical stressor from doing such labor.---Jody-Lynn Reicher

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