If you cut corners you just keep on going in circles. — Grant Stoelwinder
Yeah, uh, learned that one today. Today, I decided to give my poor volunteers a break and go out myself now that I've finally come home from the IOWA Young Writer's Studio. So, my Mom and I—shoutout once again to my mother—went to take a second sweep through some old Donors homes for some fruits that we may have missed or were in the process of ripening the first time we came by. The first house we visited is actually an old donor from a year ago that has continuously reached out to us with different fruits over the months, and the house is situated in a very awkward place for my less-than-superb parking skills. Due to this, I parked a great deal further than I would have liked, and made transporting the fruit that we gathered rather difficult. So we had the bright idea of borrowing this cart that the donor had to transport the fruit down. But when the cart was loaded and we were about it set off? It tipped and sent a lot of the apples rolling down the hill of the Donor's backyard, which we then needed to pick up. We should have just carried the bags to the car, honestly,
On the bright side, my Mom and I got a good laugh out of how inventive we became in our paranoia of spilling the apples again. I would guide the cart down the hill from the front with the handle while Mom ensured that it stayed up all the way down the hill by hooking the two pickers into the back to stabilize it. This way, all the weight didn't fall on me either and the card didn't go rolling down the hill. She was very proud of that particular idea and spent at least five minutes bragging about in the car. Then to her friends. It was very amusing to listen to.
We went to another house—the usual, nothing particularly interesting happened. Their tree was huge though, and actually really pretty. But the last house, oh my god. The lady's pear tree was on overtime, I'm not kidding. It deserved actual pay. The pear tree was actually pretty small, maybe eight feet tall and only three feet wide, but it was obviously well taken care of because it was actually loaded.
I could close my eyes and shove my hand in a random direction and come in contact with at least three massive pears. We were able to get seven bags of pears from this pretty small tree, and it was really nice because the tree was small enough to handpick all the fruits! It made it very pleasant to clear out.
This shows the importance of pruning your trees, I guess. I should do some research and post something informational about that for once. My mom has a huge green thumb, I bet she can give me some tips.
Anyway! That's it for today, I think it was a very productive picking trip! I'm not sure how many pounds of fruit we got just yet—the foodbank isn't open today so we can't drop off our donation—but I'm guessing it's somewhere in the high two hundreds, low three hundreds, which is incredible! Honestly, huge thanks to all the donors who allow us into their backyards to do all of this, it's an amazing feeling being able to make a difference as a high schooler in people's lives, especially those in my community.
All the love,
Carrie
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