And more memories

For a few brief years, when I was a tween/young teen, I helped out with something at the church we belonged to at the time. The women's group -CWF - did a big sale in the summer, with crafts and a quilt raffle and they served a lunch. The theme was strawberries, and the featured thing at the lunch was a strawberry pie. It was a fresh-fruit pie; it had a blind-baked crust that was more like shortbread than your typical pie crust (it was heavier, and had oil instead of solid shortening, and also had sugar in it) and the strawberries were covered with a "glaze" that contained, among other things, strawberry gelatin. It was very popular.

The main lunch was a couple different kinds of salad sandwiches - I think there was ham salad and chicken salad and maybe tuna salad? And there were green salads. And to drink, there was iced tea.

The strawberries, though. They had to be obtained somehow. Usually the grocery stores didn't have a lot, and they weren't such good quality, so instead, people went to a u-pick farm.

For several years, this was my job. A couple of the years - the most memorable ones - my mom's friend Marian (who didn't even belong to the same church as we did) volunteered to go pick them with me. So early a couple mornings in June, we would drive out to the country - I don't remember where it was, exactly, but it seemed pretty far away, like, a half-hour or so - and unload all the berry boxes and start picking.

It was good work. I enjoyed it. I liked Marian - in a way, she was like a supernumary aunt - and I felt like I was doing something meaningful. Marian also had a wonderful sense of humor and always had us laughing over something - she told a lot of those silly jokes that are sometimes now known as "dad jokes."

One year she couldn't go, and so instead I went with Elsa, a German lady (as in: immigrant, still had an accent) from church. I liked Elsa okay, it's just....she wasn't Marian. And she was more severe and didn't tolerate nonsense.

I think eventually the church stopped doing the lunches. I don't know if it stopped bringing in money or if there weren't enough volunteers. (I kind of think it was the second; the lunches were scheduled during a week when there was all kind of stuff going on downtown and lots of people came through)

I also waited tables a few times at the lunch, but I think I really preferred getting the strawberries...