Yes, I said gooseberries, those little green, sour obnoxious wild berries that grew abundantly in our timber. How in the world did our mother get us to go there day after day with a bucket on our arm and a determined look on our faces? The bushes were found among poison ivy, snakes, mosquitoes, gnats and prickly underbrush. We picked until they were all gone because in those days we never let anything go to waste. Actually, they were kind of good saturated with sugar over hot biscuits and covered with good thick cream.
Every year as soon as school was out in May, it was time to pick gooseberries. If she could, Mom would go with us and keep telling us how she enjoyed being out of doors away from the old cookstove. She couldn’t stay away very long because duty called her to get that all important noon meal for our big family of nine. My two younger sisters and I toiled away trying to get a gallon bucket full before noon. If we were lucky and found an unpicked patch, we could go home at noon with a bucketful.
Could we then wash them as we did strawberries and eat them? No siree! They had to be stemmed one by one. Two sides of each berry had to be plucked with your fingernail. This was worse than the picking to active children like us. Sometimes Mom had one of our grandmothers come to help her stem. They could sit on the front porch and visit while they worked, and they didn’t seem to mind at all.
Believe it or not there were people in town who would buy them. This gave us incentive to pick until we dropped. One older lady must have liked them very much. She would call and order a gallon or two. We charged 25 cents per gallon. In those days a quarter was big money to a country kid. So we took our gallon buckets and picked them full, savoring those quarters. I remember knocking on her back door with two bucketfuls. Delighted, she invited us in and took them to her kitchen table where she proceeded to pour them into a gallon crock. I remember my anxiety as she heaped them up above the rim. Two gallons became one and one-half gallons and I had to divide the profits with my sister. I really squawked when I got home, and we laugh about it to this day. I guess it was one of life’s hard knocks.
June was usually a miserable month for me because I was one that got poison ivy, and there was no relief for it then. I can remember my legs being a solid mass of blisters and scratches from the briers. Why didn’t someone tell me what poison ivy looked like so I could avoid it?
As I grew older I rebelled and opted to stay at the house and do the ironing or get dinner. I wonder what kids would do in now if confronted with such a task? I might say “try it you’ll like it,” but they wouldn’t like it. Memories are such pleasures when one gets old!
Auda B. Bratcher
Raytown, Missouri
Back in 1955 a call went out from the editors of the then Capper’s Weekly asking for readers to send in articles on true pioneers. Hundreds of letters came pouring in from early settlers and their children, many now in their 80s and 90s, and from grandchildren of settlers, all with tales to tell. So many articles were received that a decision was made to create a book, and in 1956, the first My Folks title – My Folks Came in a Covered Wagon – hit the shelves. Nine other books have since been published in the My Folks series, all filled to the brim with true tales from Capper’s readers, and we are proud to make those stories available to our growing online community.
