BERRY PICKIN TIIME
   by Madonna Pomroy

Around the 2nd or 3rd Sunday of September Mom, Dad, and all the crowd along with Jean and her crowd would go in over the hills partridge berry pickin. We would get everything ready the night before because bright and early Sunday morning we took to the hills. Now the best place for berry picking was into Johnny Moore's Hill which was about an hour or so walk. Now this walk was up hill, down hill, cross over the brooks and tear up your legs with the branches of the trees. When you got to the spot of berries, none of that would matter. Everyone had their own crock or canto pick their berries in. When you had your container full, you would go and empty it out into the flour bag which contained the grub for the day. (This flour bag was a hundred pound bag).

I remember one time when Gabe asked me to make something to take in over the hills. I got to work and made some snowballs about 3 or 4 dozen. Then we made up our sandwiches which were bread, molasses and butter and put them all into the flour bag along with a couple of tins of sausages, freshie and some ?zzies. When lunch time came around 2 or 2:30, everyone would gather round to have a mug up. (By this time the bag would be half full with berries). We would have to dig down into the bag to get our sandwiches and snowballs which would be all squat together and sometimes wet with the juice from the berries.

After our mug up we would start in picking berries again trying to fill up the flour bag. We would pick berries till about 4:30 and then Dad would have a piece of twine in his pocket to tie the top of the bag. There would be just enough left to tie and he would put the bag upon his back and start walking back out again. It would take us longer to go out because we were tired after all day going up and down hills. By the time we got home around 6 or 7 o'clock Trese would have a big Jigs dinner cooked up and no matter how tired we were, when we tasted dinner it was worth all our hard work for the day.