Cause I'm As Free As A Bird Now...

Every morning while speeding to work, I pass workers picking stawberries in the fields on Irvine Blvd. I am probably about 20 feet from the workers clad in their baggy sweatshirts with hoods that cover their faces but we might as well have a world between us. See, I am off to an office where there is paperwork to do and on my way home I may stop at the store to buy those strawberries that were on a vine this morning. I am the consumer. But for every sweet bite of stawberry that I eat, I remember that this morning a worker looked up from his crouched position and his hood fell back and our eyes met. And I smiled briefly before speeding to the next red light. And I remember, my grandma taking us to my cousin's fields to pick the leftover stawberries before they disced the ground. I remember the overpowering smell of damp earth and ripe fruit and the way my grandma told me that "it tastes sweeter when you realize the work that goes into each one." She would have known- she was from a migrant farmworking family that knew the value of good produce and the blood, sweat and tears that it took to have a sucessful crop.