The memory of tree-ripe fruit makes Suzy Foley’s mouth water after 50 years, and the fruit’s still there for the taking.
But if you want to experience some of her other magical moments, you’ll have to bring your own cat.
Foley, 62, spent much of her childhood on a family farm in Felida, now the site of the Foley Park Community Orchard. A pear harvest there was the focus of a recent “Neighbors” story in The Columbian.
Foley, who now lives in the Los Angeles area, provided a family voice for that story. Her memories included an ironic note. Today the place farmed by Hubert and Ople Foley is a recreational site. Fifty years ago? Not so much.
“We worked like dogs,” Foley, one of three children, said. “When you grow up on a farm, nothing after that ever seems like work.”
Her folks were definitely motivated to put food on the table, Foley said: Their table, and the table of anyone who was hungry.
“Dad was one of 13 kids and mom was one of 14 kids. They knew what it was like to be hungry,” she said. (Hubert died in 1995 and Ople died in 2011.)
He worked full time as an electrician at Vancouver’s old Alcoa plant, then came home and farmed full time. “He was burning it at both ends. I came in from the berry field one day and he had passed out.”
OK, that’s not so magical. But the 1970 Columbia River High School graduate recalled one of her dad’s perennial chores, climbing a ladder to prune the fruit trees.
“We had one cat that would climb up and sit above him in the tree,” Foley said. “When he moved the ladder, she would follow him” — leaping from her perch to the branch of a neighboring tree.
Another treasured memory involved hauling crates of berries to the cannery in the family’s 1952 pickup.
“On the way back, we always stopped at Fuller’s grocery store on Fruit Valley Road and got ice-cream bars,” she said.
The property is mowed now, but her dad used to plow the orchard acreage and then disc it so the powdery soil wouldn’t bruise any fruit that fell.
“My favorite memory is standing in my bare feet in the warm plowed dirt, eating a perfectly ripe peach right off the tree,” Foley said. “As a 9-year-old, you’re thinking, this is a pretty good moment. It’s all downhill from there.”
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
