What I Learned Stawberry Picking With My Grandpa

“Oh, it’s nice to get up in the morning when the sun begins to shine, at four or five or six o’clock in the good old summer time.”

I’ll never know if my Grandfather John J Jaquish made that up or remembered it from somewhere. I’ll never forget him shuffling into my bedroom at his house in Tunkhannock singing with the first birds of the morning. I groaned and pulled the blanket over my head, but I knew it was time to pick strawberries.  

 I must have been the only grandchild living at Putnam Street right then because it was Grandpa and I, and Mr. and Mrs. Space from down the street, picking ripe berries like machines. 

 I was born the year he retired from the Cooperative Extension Service out of Penn State, so if I was twenty, he was eighty-five. He’d been the first county agent in Wyoming County, PA.

He knew how to get things done. He motivated his granddaughter to pick berries by making it a competition. I picked like mad but I never gathered as many quarts as he did. If I picked sixteen, he picked eighteen. Come to think of it, he always counted them at the end too.

We picked our berries early in the morning, before it got hot. His silly song got a college student out of bed on summer morning. I don't think he learned that in the extension service, though. He did raise eight kids. I was one of 27 grandchildren. All of us have Grandpa stories.

Our berries picked we’d go home. He was tired, and the Phillies were on TV. So guess who, washed, cut, sugared, pectained, boiled, and stirred all the berries into jam? Who made sure the jars were clean and the paraffin was just right?

At the end of the day, there were pints and pints of beautiful strawberry jam under paraffin seals stored out on the back porch.

It took me as long to clean all the syrupy, strawberry, sugary, goo off the stove and counters as it had to pick the berries in the first place. One night in bed, as I shut my eyes, I vividly saw a mountain of strawberries falling on me.

When the family visited on summer weekends, Grandpa bragged about his jam and me, as he made sure my aunts and uncles had a pint or two to take home.

I was proud of all that work, glad to present my family with jam. However, I really don’t eat many strawberries, and I never “get up in the morning as the sun begins to shine, at four or five or six o’clock in the good old summer time.”