I’ve started working on my créole lately. I wasn’t particularly intent on studying another language. We already speak three at the farm, Spanish being our lingua franca given the time spent with our Mexican crew. But necessity is the mother of invention, and a smattering of créole has been useful given the help we’ve been getting from workers hired on a daily basis through a season program run by the UPA (Union des producteurs agricoles). Every year we face the challenge of figuring out how to harvest our blueberries when we’re already going full tilt on the vegetable front and our regular team is spread too thin. And so this year we welcomed them, a small crew of grand-mothers – Viergela, Marie-Ange, Violette, Lumène: old-fashioned names from another time and country – who work only during the summer months. Hard workers who have had a hard life, soft-spoken and stoic, but who open up if you take the time to get to know them. They combed through our blueberry patch to provide some summer sweetness and have already moved on to another farm, another crop – weeding a carrot or a cabbage patch somewhere, perhaps. And so it is that we have begun to acquire an ear for créole, all it took was a single blueberry season.
Another summer basket awaits, the blueberries to be replaced by our first melon, a sweetly ripened cantaloupe. Mother Nature is still generous, so one has to get creative with eggplant and summer squash. In a not too distant future, there will come a time where neither will be found in our baskets…