The Senior Scene

By Sherrie Kenyon

I was lucky to have a big sister.  I could tag along and do the big kid things with her.  It started when I was 9.  We would ride our bikes out South Bay Road in Olympia, about 5 miles, to the strawberry patches.  I wouldn’t have been able to go alone, but being escorted by Diane made it okay.

Every morning we arrived in our grubby jeans, with a sack lunch and ready to work.  We were given a crate holding 12 boxes and assigned a row.  I learned quickly to watch the person who was on the other side of my row.  It was always a challenge to stay ahead of that person because they would reach over and get the biggest strawberries on my side.

Then the row boss would come along to check my row.  I don’t know how they would always come up with a hand full of berries out of the area I had already picked.

The full crate was carried to the shack where they punched my card and sent me back with an empty crate to pick more. I quickly learned that I needed to clearly mark my place in the row before I left, or I’d never figure out where I was.

The bushes were always wet with dew first thing in the morning and before long my fingers began to wrinkle, the knees on my pants were caked with mud and I would begin to feel quite miserable. But the highlight of the day was when we were done and checked out at the shack.  We were paid every day for what we picked, so I always felt rich coming home with 45 or 50 cents in my pocket.

When I turned 12, the Cannery, where my Mother and Father both worked, closed. I knew there was some monetary tension, so I announced to my parents that I would buy all of my new school clothes that year.  To do that, I hooked up with the bus to Centralia Fruit Farms.  This was a big business, so they had a school bus arrive daily at my school.  It left at 7 a.m., so I was up very early to pack my lunch and ride my bike to the school.  It was a long bus ride to the fields, and each day we seemed to be at a different spot for picking.  The strawberry fields seemed endless.  I was left alone to pick the berries from my row, so I went to work straddling the bushes and digging through them for the ripe berries.  Pay was much higher here and I could usually make from $3 to $5 a day.

The days were long and many times I wore out before the bus was ready to leave about 4 p.m. The bus ride was restful before I had to ride my bike up the hill to home just in time for dinner.

The strawberry season only lasted about a month, so then I’d jump into picking raspberries.  I never liked that job.  Raspberries are very small and take longer to fill a box and you had to reach into the raspberry bushes, getting wet up to your armpit to get to the berries.

That summer I did buy all of my own school clothes, except the coat, which my parents bought.  I picked berries for two summers before I decided to find other employment.  It became part of my life to work and pay my own way from the time I was 12 years old.

By Sally O’Kane McClintock

I like to hold onto paper symbols of love, and  have once again recycled the 1989 desk calendar given me by my special friend, Penny. Although we haven’t seen each other for 20 years, we are in touch by e-mail almost every day. I like having this calendar of vintage wallpaper designs on my desk year after year, a symbol beyond the internet of our deep friendship. I glue new labels over the old months, as I have for the past 22 years, recycling the love that came with this gift.

But sometimes I go too far.  I remember my father’s annoyance when I kept the check for $20 that he sent us in the 1960›s.  I told him we would buy a sled for the kids and I really meant it. We did buy them a sled, but I savored the check with his familiar signature, and kept it in my desk drawer.  He never did get that account straight.

Paper comes alive for me. When I prepare seasonal note cards for friends and family, I keep them as long as I can as they await the messages I’ll write inside.  I arrange the envelopes on my table into groups of relatives, friends, and locations.  I like seeing them there, my people, and when it’s time to mail them off, I part reluctantly with the congenial gathering.

My Aunt Lois did not hold onto her cards like me.  She recycled used cards with dispatch, cutting out the names of the senders and writing her own messages all around the cut-out holes. And she was not the only one with this system in those days.  I once found a whole box of assorted greeting cards at a white elephant sale with all the senders’ names cut out and the cards as good as new, except for the holes.

My friend Penny sends her note-cards blank, writing her messages on slips of paper so the cards can be re-sent. She calls this “passing on the love.”  Although I am confident in passing on my own love, I recently found myself challenged with a stranger’s personal record of cards sent and received.

I had discovered an elegant used address book at a thrift shop. The cover was of green leather with “Address Book” printed in the middle of a gold bouquet. Inside were names and addresses and check-marks for cards sent and received from 1974 to 1979. The writing was in pencil. I had a soft eraser that would make an erasing project easy if I wished to re-use the address book for myself.  Intrigued with this artifact of someone else’s world, I paid a dollar for the little book and took it home.

I began my recycling project, erasing line by line.  I looked at the names, erased, and blew on the pages- looked, erased and blew, looked, erased and blew. Then I paused as I began to wonder about the owner of the book. Why had she stopped after six years? Had she passed away, her personal address book following her? I grew more and more uncomfortable with removing her work,  and regretted the haste with which I was deleting her love-ones’ names.

My reaction puzzled me. Why did I feel this way about a stranger who might not even be alive? I decided to e-mail my friend Penny, who is always good at getting to the core  of a problem in a wise and unusual way.

Her reply came at once. “All the names in there have found another breath and another moment of aliveness because you saw them,” she explained, “as did she who last held the little book with all her friends.”

With Penny”s explanation, my regrets vanished.  If my looking at the names had breathed some life into them, if only for a moment, then it was all right to keep erasing. Besides, the love the owner had for her people could never be erased.

So I continued recycling the address book. And as I penciled in my own list, I reflected on the ultimate recycling of love, “to love one another as I have loved you.”