Dec. 26, 2011

Annual cleaning of the fruit room

As I have had cause to reflect back on my youth and some of the experiences I have had it has become very apparent to me that some of the things that I had to do in my youth really were not as bad as I thought while in the midst of doing them. I have in fact come to realize that I rather enjoyed them over some thing that I probably could have done. Cleaning the fruit room was one of those tasks that I thought I didn’t like but has come to be a treasured memory of sorts instead. Each year as we prepared to put up the fruit from that season we would have to remove some of the age old fruit that hadn’t been eaten and dump it out in the garden or give it to the pigs depending on if we had any that year or not. I somehow got elected to do this task most of the time when I became old enough to get the lids off the bottles. I remember the worst part of the job was dumping out the bottles where the seal had broken and the mold had grown out of control on the top of the fruit. It was disgusting and hard to empty as well. It would require taking a spoon or spatula to the bottle and digging it out at first and then finally being able to let the rest of the fruit run out. There always seemed to be several of those and I didn’t like them. I thought they were going to make me deathly ill if I breathed in the dust from the mold so I always held my breath while performing the dirty task. Well it wasn’t really all that bad but I did learn some important organizing skills since it also required putting the old fruit in front and the newest in back so the old got used first, (except when I went to get the fruit and I liked to dig it out of the back since I usually used it in fruit drinks after school.) It also helped with organizing skills that were needed when I would dig into the attics and clean them or into the barn to clean it. Yes I do think that I probably volunteered for the duty more times than I was really assigned since I did quite enjoy the task. Now washing the bottles after they were emptied, well that wasn’t quite so fun.