What Margo from Zihuatenejo told us to do

While picking out apples at the market today, a word wound its way under my breath as I spotted the empty hole in the dip of the apple where the stem should have been. It's a cull, I said. Then that memory-flash-back-thing started happening, and voila, a blog is born.
When I was married to my first husband, we went to Wenatchee, WA on expert advice from an ex patriot hippy who lived in Zihuatanejo. She told us when we get back to the states, we could earn a few bucks picking apples. We were heading to Spokane in a few months, meeting up with a man we met while picking something called magic mushrooms in Palenque. Why not apples?
Wenatchee is near a lake called Chelan, and that is what she named her daughter. And picking apples is what we did. It was fall of 1974.
Funny, the only vocabulary word I remember from that experience is cull. I learned a few facts like red delicious apples can only grow when there are golden delicious apples. Golden delicious are harder to pick and easier to damage, so bummer. We picked apples about 3 weeks on a small orchard. The family was kind and included us for some dinners and homemade ice cream and their shower,every evening. We slept in our VW bus and picked apples 5 days a week.
At one point I think I figured out we picked a half ton of apples a piece. I must have been in pretty good shape. We met other folks who just followed the harvest around the entire USA.
We did it on a lark. We didn't really need the money, just wanted the experience. I can't even remember how much we made.
The young boy who lived there would come out to the orchard and visit. The only thing I remember about him was how he was obsessed with never swearing or never being bad, because if you are really really a good person, one day you'll be able to fly. I loved that about him.
When we got back to Los Angeles, our original starting point, I looked in a dictionary and found a picture of the bag we wore that held the apples. It was like a reverse back pack, and probably even had a name. We'd strap them on every morning, take a lunch break, then pick for a few more hours. I got pretty good at wielding around a ladder.
Another rung in my school of hard knocks.