Color Purple Haze

So before I get too far off on a tangent on newer Facts, I wanted to discuss a little bit more about those purple, nightmarish orbs known as
Huckleberries, and what further horrors that they had wrought on my life. Or to be more accurate what further horrors my parents cast upon me that were associated with said hellberries.

As I mentioned in the previous fact "Child Labor of Love" (already deemed a classic), in my family's futile attempt to fight the constant onslaught of poverty, my mother constructed a small business based off of tourists' lust for the disgustingly popular fruit known as Huckleberries. This small business was primarily built and sustained with my sweat, blood and tears, in an unholy mixture that could only be described as a pain cocktail. The mixture was 4:2:3 for those with the need to know.

This leaves an interesting plot hole/questionable conundrum to the whole situation: Where the eff did all those devilberries come from? They didn't just shit themselves on my mother's lap on a regular basis, ready to be squashed, cooked and sold, did they? Of course not, that's just crazy talk!

Who'd make up some crap like that!

No, my parents force marched us up to the mountains and would not let us come back home until we hand picked enough berries to sustain us for weeks on end.

It didn't start out this way, not initially. At first my parents did all of the picking, and we (siblings and whoever else was unlucky enough to tag along) were allowed to just run around in the the woods and act like little jackasses. We'd do things like play war, wake up bears, throw rocks in the air, it was fantastic. Then one day it all changed.


After realizing that having an additional several pair of small hands helping you pick Huckleberries are better than NOT having several pair of small hands pick huckleberries, my parents were quick to sever the ties to those childish games as quick as possible. No more fun games like 'running into tree as fast as possible', or 'see if this is edible'. Nope, those were all gone. From now on the only fun to be had was seeing how high we could count berries before we passed out from heat exhaustion. My personal favorite was to see how much dust you could consume from the passing vehicles on the dirt roads. I could never quite seem to record my personal best as I always seemed to cough up whatever I inhaled.


I'm not quite sure how many years this went on, seeing as this primarily went on through the summer months and only every few days. And to be fair, my mother did occasionally buy those purple bastard berries from a local fool, but as I pointed out in my previous Fact, child-slave labor is so much more affordable.

So it's a Fact: Free fruit is never truly free.