NotSoThoreau

I didn’t really intend for this to become a goat blog. So I’ll post today about what I always think about this time of year: farm work. I’ve done both farm work and office work. I can tell you that farm work is far more satisfying. It’s hard physically. But there is a rhythm to it. Things get done and are finished. You can see results. This time of year, pears would be starting up. We’d be doing bartletts. Packing pears is a strange art. You wrap pears in special paper and arrange them in a box based on size and weight. You need to be within two pounds of the correct weight or you get your box back and repack. You are paid by the box, so this matters. Pears with a lot of sugar weigh more so you have to compesate. You move on to anjous, which are the main pear crop. Sometimes you get something like forelles or seckels. Seckels are tiny. You can do 2 or 3 hundred in a box.

I’ve also picked apples so this would be thinning time. You’d go out and thin the apples to space them a bit. In a few weeks, you’d start to pick. You are paid by the bin, so you can work as hard or slow as you want. You learn to pace yourself. You’re out in the trees so there is some shade. If it rains, you don’t pick because the ladders are too slippery. Winter/early spring is pruning time. In the pear packing world, you do repacks, where you go through unsold boxes, pull out the bad ones and repack them with additional fruit. There are always breaks in the season, where you are on unemployment for a bit.

It’s so different from working in an office. You get to be outside, in the weather. You get to see things. No one is looking over your shoulder. You just do your job. You don’t have to learn something new every 20 minutes. Pear packing today is the same way it was in the 40s. Same thing with picking apples. The downside is that it gets harder when you get older. I stopped packing pears because my left thumb joint was starting to go. It’s common to have surgery on that joint. You slam pears into it all day and it breaks down. Still have arthritis in it.

There’s a big pear crop this year and the plant is just across the river from my current job. There are some mornings that I want to just drive to work there and see if my body can still take it. I can’t, of course. I’ve got a land payment to make that I can barely afford with my tech job. But I would love to sink back into that rhythm again.