My mother's record for cherry picking was 22 lugs. That was when she was a young woman. My record was eight and I only achieved that once or twice in my picking career. That will give you an idea of why my mother was always a bit disgusted with my cherry picking ability.
I started young, at around five, when my mother took my sister, brother and me with her to her uncle's farm to pick. The season usually began shortly after the fourth of July. When I was five I was required to get 1/2 lug in the morning and then in the afternoon I could go into the farmhouse with my younger sister while she took a nap.
The farm would have been a great place if cherry picking was not involved. During the lunch hour we were allowed into the barn to play in the hay. The aroma of the new hay and the fun of jumping off the bales is a fond memory. At the end of the season, which usually lasted two weeks, my mother's cousin Emily fixed a great picnic lunch for everyone. It included hamburgers, potato salad, lemonade and wonderful desserts.
We were paid 50 cents a lug at my mother's uncle's farm and it may have gone up to a dollar in my early teen years, but I don't recall as I made only enough to buy a few school clothes. A lug was a wooden box of a certain size that I now sometimes see in antique stores. I find it amusing when I see them as I wouldn't be caught dead buying one. Yet I have seen them sell. We used a picking pail that was hooked onto straps that went over our shoulders. They were always stinky and sticky. On bigger trees we had to haul ladders around to get to the tops of the trees.
In later years we picked cherries for my Uncle Tom. There were cousins and other kids from town who joined the crew. Here's where my picking problem started because expectations were higher. I liked to pick on the same tree with my cousin Susie. Susie was a good talker and I would sit on my ladder and listen to her while I picked slowly. Soon Susie would be emptying her bucket and mine wouldn't even be half full. She could always pick two lugs to my one and sometimes she was even faster than that. My mother thought she would encourage me along when she said, "I don't know why you can't pick like Susie." Her words never made me faster.
When boredom hit mid afternoon there was often a cherry fight. My brother was a good one for hitting someone with a cherry and then the battle was on. Usually it was stopped by an adult who could hear the shrieks and laughter. The discussion that always went on in the orchard was the wish for someone to invent a cherry picking machine. We thought my uncle might have some ideas and we always dreamed it would be ready for the next season. It never happened in my cherry pickin' lifetime.
I must admit though that the most fun was picking the "Lake Farm" which my Uncle Tom owned close to Lake Michigan. It was a young orchard and we didn't have to use ladders to pick. We could walk from tree to tree and if the trees were loaded we got our lugs easily. That is where I set my record of eight.
At the end of the day if it was really hot we might get to go to my aunt and uncle's cottage on Lake Michigan which was just down the road from the cherry orchard. If we could end the day with a swim in the big lake we were happy. Even though I disliked picking cherries as a kid I think it beat what my husband had to do when he was young......hoe beans!
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