The sweet smell of bright red strawberries to this day, remind me of the Hale Ranch. Over twenty acres of fresh strawberries ripe for the picking would fill the air and we would go over the fence and pick a basket everyday if we wanted.
The Mexican workers would see dad with his cowboy hat, dark hair and tan red neck and try to speak Spanish to him. "Agua, agua, por favor." Dad would have one of the boys fill their jug up with water.
On the other side of the neighbor's field was peppers with thick green leaves, the cows would want to get through the fence to eat it up. One mean old cow pushed the calf through the fence, the calf would bellow as he would get a good jolt from the electric wire than ran across the top of the barbwire fence. The fence would be knocked over from the calf's body and the mean old cow could escape to eat pepper leaves. After she ate the pepper leaves she would get sick from the picante hot pepper plants.
How about when we would have pepper fights and go get peppers and strawberries to throw at each other? I remember Matt getting some in his eye and crying to Dad about trying to get it out of his eye but Dad couldn't see anything in his eye and couldn't understand Matt through his crying. It took Dad a few minutes to figure out that Matt actually had pepper juice in his eye not dirt, or rocks or whatever was the norm.
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