The Privilege of Picking Cherries Slowly
The other day, in one of those meandering conversations with my husband that begin nowhere and end everywhere, I found myself talking about my first “real” job. Real in the sense that someone handed me actual money in exchange for my labor — an astonishing concept for a twelve‑year‑old who had no economic reason to be working. I was, by all accounts, a child with a full fridge and parents whose strictness was athletic and dietal rather than financial. The kind of household where you could refuse pocket money but not a mandatory jog.
It was 2005. I remember the year only because I spent the entire summer singing one Eurovision song on an endless loop. The job was cherry picking. Not metaphorical cherry picking — not the curated optimism of adulthood — but actual cherries, in an actual field, under an actual sun that seemed personally offended by my existence.
This was the pre‑smartphone era, the dark ages before podcasts and Bluetooth headphones. I owned a tiny MP3 player that held maybe twelve songs if you begged it, but naturally I had forgotten it at home. So my only entertainment during the slowest task known to humankind was… myself. My own voice. My own questionable pitch. My own determination to survive boredom through sheer, unhinged musical commitment.
Of course, if you’ve been reading me for any length of time, you know I wouldn’t dedicate an entire essay to the tragicomic state of my vocal abilities. There had to be something else beneath the memory — some hinge, some shift, some quiet ethical tremor.
And there was.
As I’ve said, I didn’t have to do this job. Even my strict parents — the same heroic figures who believed character was best built by waking a child at dawn to kick a ball for hours — did not require me to go cherry picking. This particular form of torture was entirely voluntary.
I signed up out of solidarity. My cousin Dragana actually needed the money that summer, though the exact reason has dissolved into the fog of memory. I think it had something to do with buying schoolbooks — those heavy, joyless bricks of knowledge that cost a small fortune and smelled faintly of despair.
So there I was, a sunburn‑prone sidekick on her quest for educational funding. I wasn’t there for the money. I wasn’t there for the cherries. I wasn’t even there for the experience, because no one in the history of humanity has ever said, “You know what shaped me? Picking fruit in 40‑degree heat.”
I was there because Dragana had to be. And at twelve, that felt like reason enough.
But childhood acts of solidarity have a way of revealing more than they intend. Somewhere between the heatstroke, the boredom, and my Eurovision soundtrack, something shifted. It dawned on me — slowly, the way realizations do when your brain is half‑cooked by July — that every single person in that field, except me, was there out of necessity.
While I picked cherries at my leisurely pace (further slowed by the fact that I ate half of every box), the others were racing. Competing. Moving with the kind of urgency that comes from knowing the math of survival. We were paid per box. A simple equation: more cherries, more money. And while I was busy serenading the orchard and contemplating the meaning of life, these people were working with a precision that made my “moral support” mission look almost comically naïve.
They weren’t there for character building. They weren’t there for cousinly solidarity. They were there because the next schoolbook, the next bill, the next meal depended on it.
It was the first time I had to confront the uncomfortable truth of my own lucky circumstances. I didn’t know poverty. Not really. Yes, my childhood had its own merciless curriculum — mandatory running activities, early‑morning ball‑kicking sessions, and parents whose motivational style bordered on military — but I had never experienced the kind of necessity that bends a person’s back over a field at dawn.
My parents used to remind me how fortunate I was. “At least you don’t have to milk cows every morning like your aunt and cousins,” they’d say, usually while dragging me to yet another training session I had not consented to. But because my parents were, in my adolescent opinion, delightfully unhinged, their warnings never landed. It all sounded like one more chapter in their ongoing saga of You don’t know how good you have it.
It wasn’t until I stood in that field myself — sweating, singing, and eating my way through half the cherries — that their words finally found a place to settle. Watching the others work with a speed I couldn’t imitate, I understood what necessity looks like when it’s not theoretical. When it’s not a parental lecture. When it’s not a story about someone else’s cows.
Only then, with my hands sticky and my pride slightly bruised, did I understand what my parents — who did know poverty — had been trying to convey all along.
The question now is: What do I do with this realization?
I can’t pretend I know what it means to fear for tomorrow’s meals. I don’t. I’ve never been poor in the way that rearranges your nervous system. The kind of poor where you count coins not out of thriftiness but out of survival. The kind of poor that sends you into a cherry field at dawn because the alternative is not paying the bills.
My worst financial moment was being an 18‑year‑old student in Vienna who couldn’t afford restaurant meals or spontaneous weekend trips. That’s a bit poor, yes, but it’s the kind of poor where you still have a roof, still have groceries, still have a future that feels intact. It’s the kind of poor where you complain about not affording sushi, not about not affording bread.
So no, I cannot claim to understand the lives of the people who picked cherries beside me. I cannot retroactively insert myself into their struggle. But I can acknowledge the gap. I can recognize the luck I was born into, even if it came wrapped in early‑morning sports trauma and parents who believed exhaustion was a character‑building tool.
And maybe that’s the point: not to appropriate someone else’s hardship, but to let the awareness soften you. To let it unsettle your certainty. To let it remind you that your life could have been different — much harder — if a few circumstances had shifted.
Realizing your own luck isn’t about guilt. It’s about humility. It’s about seeing the world more clearly, even if the clarity arrives carried on the memory of cherries, sunburn, and a Eurovision song you sang far too badly.
When I think back to that summer now, I don’t think of the cherries or the sunburn or even my soundtrack. I think of the strange, tender education I received without realizing it — an education in perspective, in the invisible scaffolding that held my life together while others had to build theirs plank by plank, box by box.
I still don’t know what it means to work because your survival depends on it. I can’t claim that experience, and I won’t pretend to. But I do know what it means to stand beside someone who does — to watch their speed, their focus, their quiet urgency — and to feel something shift inside you. A softening. A widening. A small but permanent recalibration of the world.
Maybe that’s all any of us can do with the realizations that arrive too early or too late: let them change the way we move through the world. Let them make us gentler with others, and a little less dramatic about our own inconveniences. Let them remind us that luck is not a virtue, and hardship is not a moral failing.
I went into that field to support my cousin. I left it understanding something about humanity.
In the end, the cherries were just cherries. But the lesson stayed.
