Word: fruited
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...only are the hours long, but the work is almost always monotonous hand labor; and many times this summer I felt I had been transported back in time several centuries. We spent most of the time picking fruit: peaches, pears, and cherries. Each day, every day, we slowly wound our way among the trees, picking the fruits as quickly as we could, as time ticked by ever so slowly. The Vallets had only 30 acres, less than one-tenth the size of the average American farm, and so every last fruit had to be picked, and not a peach could...
...Vallets, although the father also had a factory job which began each morning at 5 a.m. After getting off at 1 p.m., he joined us in the fields until 8 p.m. He worked all day Saturdays, too, and he "rested" Sundays by fixing up his houses or by picking fruit for his family's table. He spent virtually all his waking hours working on one monotonous task after another...
...peasants in Moras En Valloire have little to look forward to but more work. The only respite from the toil comes with death--all the peasant's life he is little more than a tool, bobbing up and down the rows, pulling the weeds or picking the fruit. For me it was an adventure. albeit not always a very exciting one. For them it is the only life they have ever known--and the only life they will ever know...
Most of the summer was not nearly that interesting, however. Most of my time was spent picking fruit to the ever-so-slow ticking of my watch. The peasant lifestyle was very different from anything found in America, and especially different from life at Harvard. Intellectualism was worthless in Moras En Valloire--nothing counted except how quickly a person could pick the peaches. It was a hard life, one in which a person spent most of his waking hours working, with few diversions and only the simplest of pleasures...
This time of year, the peasants in Moras En Valloire are busy pruning the fruit trees. The Garcias are probably doing the same. If it is daylight now in France, the family is out in the fields, working hard, just as they did yesterday and just as they will do for all the tomorrows left in them. But while they work, the Garcias smile, laugh, and sing, defying their poverty and sharing with each other the joys of the simple life that is the lot of the peasant...