Nicely written and makes me remember my youth.
Unloading watermelons, one by one, like a fire brigade from a semi, placing them into bins on pallets. Hard work but it made you strong and you’d learned a lot things. Old women wearing all black would come in after closing for the plum tomatoes and I would stay to pick out two dozen half-bushel baskets and load their cars.
A couple weeks later I’d receive containers of home made gravy.
And then there was the “Pierogie Lady”, she had to be 90 and drove an old black T-Bird with suicide doors, she’d turn cases of russets into awesomeness.
Indeed -- practically brought tears to my eyes. When my siblings and I were kids, the route to the "shopping center" (what would now be called a strip mall) was through the woods. As the path began to open out to the sunshine, the sides of it were lined with blackberry bushes. There has never been any blackberry since that has tasted as good as those big ol' blue-purple berries ripening in the sun.
And don't get me started on the pork roasts and cracklings back in the day before the food nazis started reducing the fat content of pigs by slaughtering them younger and younger, after having mass-produced piglets and feeding them mass-produced drek instead of letting pigs grow large in open-air pens on a wide variety of scraps from the farm.