Evelyn

My maternal grandmother was Evelyn Hathcock Kerby and she could pick 100 bushels of fruit a day.

A bushel box of apples weighs 40 pounds and is slightly larger than a ten-ream box of copy paper. She picked her 100 bushels while she was pregnant and simultaneously watching and caring for her toddlers. My maternal grandfather, Thomas "Old Tom" Kerby, will turn 97 in November. In his lifetime of owning the farm he has never been one day late with a payment. This is the stock I come from.

I am fascinated with the work ethic of my grandparents. They are a good story.

My grandparents bought 60 acres of the fertile San Juan River Valley in 1945 for $12,000. At the time they already had three small children and they would end up having seven more. Together they cleared ten acres of cottonwood trees so a crop could be planted. Grandpa chopped the trees down by hand and pushed the stumps over with a tractor. Grandma was right by his side helping while their kids played in a lean-to set up in the snow. They planted 20 acres of fruit trees and the other acreage yielded hay, potatoes and corn. The work was obviously physical and brutal but it had to be done and it gave them true grit. In 1948, while Grandma dug potatoes for the harvest, their 14-month old son drowned in the irrigation ditch.

Back in those days there were no apple houses or cold storage facilities to preserve the picked fruit. Grandpa dug a deep trench 10-20 feet wide,  filled it with apples, and covered them with straw. (He didn't actually get cold storage until the 70s.) Without cold storage the main source of income in the late 40s was to sell to truckers. Truckers would bring a big semi to the farm and load up hundreds of bushels of fruit. Grandpa couldn't find any help to pick the fruit, not even at the unemployment office, so Grandma became the help. Side by side they picked. Grandpa grabbed the high fruit from a ladder, Grandma plucked what was low from ground with the little kids. There was no dinner until they had each picked 100 bushels.

Grandpa still says, "No one ever out-picked Mama." She was a good worker, a hard worker and a fast worker. Today we hear Oprah talk about "multitasking" as if it means "talking on the phone while you paint your nails." My grandmother multitasked a living out of raw land during queasy first trimesters and painful third trimesters and never had a girls' night out. She was up before dawn in her dress with her hair done ready to feed the brood. She went to bed early after cleaning her face with Merle Norman cold cream.

I did not inherit Grandma's strength of being a morning person, nor have I raised ten children. But I can pick 100 bushels of fruit in a day.

Of course it's not really fruit, but I can paste 100 bushels of wallpaper or stain 100 bushels of fence or freelance 100 bushels of good design. I can work hard, as can all of my siblings. There's not a bum kid in our family. Suzette is a dental hygienist that also makes custom baby bedding and blogs for the local newspaper. Cristall is making it solely as a fine art painter, although she has taught private school, art lessons, and math tutoring in the past. Matthew is a landscape architect with side businesses from excavation to vinyl letters to graphic design. Natalie is going to school for a second Bachelor's degree while working full-time.  I don't know if we inherited it, if my parents lucked out, or if our ability to get it done was the result of conscious parenting. I think it was a combination of all three.

Now if I can just get my daughter to unload the dishwasher without crying.