THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 13, 1995 TAG: 9508090064
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KRYS STEFANSKY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 92 lines
HUMID, HEAVY and still, the very air seems to cling to her. A white tank top, the back soaked with sweat, sticks to her skin. Tendrils of hair wet with perspiration are plastered to her face and neck.
Oblivious to the hot sun beating down on this field south of Pungo, Pearl A. Combs is happily doing her job, picking blueberries for sale.
She likes the work and meeting people who come here to pick their own.
``Obnoxious people don't pick blueberries,'' she says, a smile crinkling her eyes, blue-gray as the fruit. ``And I feel healthy in my mind and body here.''
Her fingers are stained indigo. Her white plastic bucket hangs by its handle from the snap on the front of her jeans shorts.
It's a funny place to hang a bucket, but it keeps both hands free to tickle berries from the bushes. One by one, she plucks the tiny fruit marbles off and rolls them out of her palms into the container.
The small, slightly built woman casts spells on berries during the summer, conjuring up 14 full buckets - 100 pounds - from 7:30 in the morning to half past noon.
``That's a good day,'' Combs says modestly.
``Her hands move so fast it's unreal,'' Juanita Burns says. She and her husband own Pungo Blueberries, Etc., the farm Combs has worked on for the past six years. About 10 percent of their crop is picked for market and delivered to local gourmet shops and fruit stands. From June through August Combs supervises the berry harvest and trains teen-agers hired by the farm to pick fruit.
It's easier picking with the sun behind you, she tells the kids, because the berries are easy to see. But pick facing the sun and the berries are more plentiful, since nobody likes to pick in that direction.
When the kids come wanting work, she always wonders if they'll tough it out.
``I tell them, `When you pick two buckets, you go sit,' '' she says. ``By that time I'll have six, but I don't tell them that.''
Blueberries, her favorites, hang in clusters that ripen all at once.
``You have to coax them off,'' she says. ``They're a very easy berry to pick.''
Blackberries and raspberries need a lighter touch, ``You have to be more selective and if you squeeze them, they're gone.''
Occasionally, Combs whips up a few jars of preserves in her kitchen in Kempsville, but she's no blueberry fool.
``Sometimes you just don't even want to look at them,'' she says.
Pearl Combs, 48, learned her trade secrets from her mother in the Finger Lake district in upstate New York where she grew up. Her parents had a dairy.
``My mom always took us berry picking when we were children,'' she says.
``We picked grapes, blackberries, raspberries, cherries and peaches. And during the summers, as teen-agers, we worked on the farms.''
When Combs grew up, she married her childhood sweetheart and eventually had five children. Her husband, Bob, a photographer and college professor, and their children moved here 16 years ago.
One summer when the family came berry picking at the Burns' farm, Pearl Combs happened on her present job.
``We were short-handed that day and I had a huge order to fill and Pearl and the children were just standing there and she said, `We'll help you pick,' '' Burns recalls. Combs and her children started plucking berries and Burns met the order.
When Combs' husband died of cancer six years ago, familiar farm work felt right and good.
``I'd brought my son and daughter out from Kempsville to work here and started working alongside them. I found it very therapeutic,'' she says.
She teaches quilting classes, too, but the physical labor of berry picking relaxes her.
``I do a lot of thinking here, that's what keeps me coming back,'' she says. ``With teen-agers, I have a lot to keep me thinking.''
She works hatless and in shorts, shirt and sneakers. Sometimes she wraps a wet towel around her shoulders to fight the heat.
She starts each June, helping her boss hang netting that keeps migrating birds from stealing the fruit. She finishes in August when people seem to tire of eating berries and won't buy them anymore.
``That was the hardest to get used to,'' she says, spreading her hands out, palms up. ``There are always all these berries still on the bushes and we have to stop.''
The end of the summer means the end of her job, the end of all those hours of being free to pick berries and think.
Come each September, Combs misses the solitude of standing between two long rows of 8-foot-tall berry bushes with no sound for company but the plop of ripe fruit, the buzzing of insects and the rustle of leaves as the wind passes through them. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
RICHARD L. DUNSTON/Staff
by CNB