Posted on 10/03/2021 1:03:07 PM PDT by thecodont
Even as late as the 1960s rural schools in the deep South used to let kids out for cotton picking. This was both black and white schools. My husband and his brothers used to go to the grandparents farm and pick. Hot, hard work.
Yes! read that two of these apples are yuck to eat, and I think they are tasty!..sissies!
Yep, this useless story is from Vox, all right.
It’s not just here that Apple picking is a deal. Italy, too, has a huge apple culture. In the fall folk come from all over to pick apples and enjoy festivals.
So many that hotels are sold out.
After Apple-Picking
BY ROBERT FROST
My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.
Glad you liked it. I never looked up what “Gr Golden” meant. Now I know.
I guess I really never realized they had 900 trees to tend. I visited them once in the late 1950s and came away with the impression that they had a cherry orchard. I didn’t know about the great variety of apples and other fruit they grew.
Most of my jobs besides early in life required the mind and body. I did a few hard construction years with the older carpenters telling me to go back to school or earn a bad back.
Carrier deck of an Aircraft carrier? Yeah that’s harsh. Older I got the less I got calloused.
But I tell you, working on a farm and a ranch was hard sometimes mundane but I’m glad I did it. In my older age( 60’s) I have a ton of respect for hard work and both ranching and farming require an adept mind plus the callouses. But like you, I’m glad I was able to use my mind later on because my body would have been broken by age thirty.
‘I used to pick apples on weekends when I was in high school (1980s)’
I also picked apples, in 1966, the fall of my senior year; on Saturdays and Sundays picked for 9 hours a day (started with ‘greenings’, as the farmer called them, and worked my way throguth to the macs and cortlands); on weekdays after school I worked from four to seven in his primitive sorting mill...
I remember sitting atop one of the trees gazing off into the distance enjoying the warm breeze and the views of the church spires in a town seven miles distant (and eating as many apples as my belly would tolerate)...great times...
This guy completely fails to understand the agrarian roots of American society. He needs to experience a very cold and lean winter without work, welfare or a full pantry. Maybe two or three years like this… with some hardcore scavenging for survival. He also needs to work, I mean physical labor, outside for a full winter. Then he will perhaps begin to understand the importance and meaning of growing and gathering your own food.
Agreed.
I also think he's indulging in a form of "luxury belief" that agriculture is low-class and nasty.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/4001512/posts
quoting
https://quillette.com/2019/11/16/thorstein-veblens-theory-of-the-leisure-class-a-status-update/
"The chief purpose of luxury beliefs is to indicate evidence of the believer’s social class and education. Only academics educated at elite institutions could have conjured up a coherent and reasonable-sounding argument for why parents should not be allowed to raise their kids, and should hold baby lotteries instead. When an affluent person advocates for drug legalization, or anti-vaccination policies, or open borders, or loose sexual norms, or uses the term “white privilege,” they are engaging in a status display. They are trying to tell you, “I am a member of the upper class.” '"
Sneering at our nation's agricultural roots is a form of "luxury belief" and thus status signaling.
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