List your top 5 favorite fruits.

My most favorite fruit of all are blueberries. When I was a kid, we lived near a blueberry farm. All the neighbor kids worked there for the summer. We were given a basket and had to pick enough to fill it. Each bucketload was a dollar. If you were good, you could earn $20.00 a day on weekends.

We also lived near an apple orchard, but they used machinery and migrant workers to pick the apples. We had an apple every day. The back of the apple orchard grew onto the back of our property. We could pick apples for my mom to make pies, cobbler, and apple butter.

I love watermelon and we grew them on our farm. Big and juicy.

Our farm was just big enough for us to preserve and can fruits and vegetables for the winter. We stored them in the root cellar.

Another favorite fruit we grew was rhubarb. And my mom made rhubarb pie, rhubarb jams and jellies.

One fruit we also grew was Concord grapes, purple and white. My mom made great jam with them and also turned some into a kind of drink that as kids, we weren’t allowed to have.

Now, kids go to the grocery store to pick out their favorite fruits. And that makes me sad. They’re never going to enjoy watching a plant grow, flower, then produce something wonderful to eat. That they cared for with their own hands.

They’ll never experience the joy of opening a jar of peaches in the middle of winter and remember going to the peach farm to buy bushels of peaches and prepare them for canning.

It’s not exactly the fruit that’s my favorite, it’s the memories.