Excerpt from my father's booklet of short stories that he called "Prairie Ramblings" This story is about berry picking with his family in the 1930's.
Picking Berries
Special Announcement! Tomorrow we are going to go pick berries. The weather is perfect and the Saskatoons will be just right.
Everything has to be ready. Get out the syrup pails, and of course clean up the five-gallon cream can to put the berries in, to satisfy the more optimistic pickers.
Prepare for rain just in case, because we will be at least 8 miles away from home. We will probably be going with a team of horses and the democrat. It’s an annual event with a picnic lunch and lots of fresh water.
I can recall one special time when I was about 12 years old. There were about five of us and we took our neighbour, Mrs. Gray, along with us.
We arrived at our favorite picking spot and after securely tying the horses to a tree and giving them a bundle of hay to chew on, we started out, each one looking for a choice spot where he could fill his pail quickly.
What luck! I found a perfect spot: beautiful big berries, not too high up. It was perfect. I kept very quiet so as not to attract anyone else to this great discovery.
Everything was going fine. I had a nice start in my pail and had a pretty good feed myself besides, when suddenly something was wrong. I began to itch all over until it became unbearable. Dropping my pail, I began to roll on a grassy spot, searching for relief from the itching.
In my great haste to pick those beautiful berries, I had failed to check the ground I was standing on. I had been standing right in the middle of a huge ant hill, and they were well organized, determined to get rid of this unknown intruder.
I had never experienced this before and, becoming quite frightened, I began to call for help. I’ll never forget the instructions from Mrs.
Gray. “Take your clothes off, son! Take your clothes off!”
That was not the kind of advice a twelve-year-old wanted to hear, especially not in the presence of a stranger. But I pulled off my shirt and with the help of a couple of my sisters slapping at the insects, the ants finally left. What an experience! What a lesson. Always check where you are standing, especially if the berries are looking good.
Well, as I recall we were soon on our way home. The cream can was not quite as full as we were, but it was a good successful day, nevertheless.
Yes, there were lots of jam and fruit made from those berries, along with rhubarb, black currants, raspberries, gooseberries, choke cherries, not to mention countless sealers of veggies from the huge garden, all prepared and ready for a long Saskatchewan winter.
Life was a ball; a family affair with lots of fun and learning for our own future.
We carried on with the berry picking tradition until the bushes and the Saskatoon berries fell victim to the bull dozers. Now we go to the berry farms, where everything is in neat rows and there are no ant hills.
There was something special about those days that we no longer know.
It brought a great deal of satisfaction to know that when you sat down to enjoy a thick slice of Saskatoon berry pie, you had played a part in it.