By Sandra McComb

“Tillsonburg, Tillsonburg ………My back still aches when I hear that word.”
Those are, of course, the famous words in the song bearing the same title, sung by that great Canadian, Stompin’ Tom Connors, describing his tobacco-picking experience near Tillsonburg, Ontario.  I can relate to his pain, because there is an odd time when I see a jar of Bick’s pickles on the grocery shelf that I get a bit of a twinge myself.  
  When picking cucumbers in my garden the other day, memories of my past close-up-and-personal relationship with this green vegetable, came to mind. 
As a 13-year-old, I had decided it was time to graduate from my pony to a larger animal and I had a quarter horse in my sights.  Around this time my older sister was looking ahead to teacher’s vollege and wanted her own set of wheels, while our youngest sister, at the tender age of nine, had no immediate materialistic aspirations.  
Family discussion revolved around the issue of our wants, and a plan was formulated around the supper table.  Bicks had a grading station in Dublin at the time and word was out that they were looking for growers to supply them with cucumbers for processing.  After hearing about the prospect of the good money that could be made picking cucumbers, and with Mom and Dad’s promise to help, we three girls were all in.  A contract with Bicks was signed with a flourish and the fun was about to begin.
The four-acre field east of our farm buildings became “Cucumber Acres”.   The first year we only planted a quarter of the field, but even an acre of cucumbers still represents an awful lot of gas.  And work, and sore backs.
That spring the seeds that we carefully planted, weeded and cared for flourished, and weeks later picking began.   We had a choice of picking the whole area in a day, which would give us the next day off – or picking only half of it every day, which gave us no days off.   We tried it both ways and the job was no more pleasurable one way or the other.
Several back-bending weeks later we put our first year behind us with a resolution to never do that again.  To encourage us, our Dad, being the creative inventor that he was, announced that if we would do it another year he would build us a cucumber picker to make the job easier.  We then reconsidered and agreed we’d give it another go, hardly able to contain our excitement thinking about a machine that would actually do the picking for us. However, our joy was short-lived when Dad explained that his invention would only be a machine that would allow us to lie down when picking, thereby only saving our backs. The labour would still be all ours.  This was our earliest example of that simple truth:  “If it sounds too good to be true then it probably is”.  The machine had room for three people to lay on it, and not being a stomach-sleeper to begin with, being a stomach-cucumber-picker held little excitement for me.  However, it was definitely a back-saver, and as it straddled the cucumber rows the plants would pass by inches below, cucumbers would be picked and then tossed into the large basket positioned ahead of you.        
Our youngest sister usually got the boring job of driving.  Actually, even without a driver, whoever laid in the centre position could very easily steer and pick at the same time, as the motor had been geared down, and it crept along very s-l-o-w-l-y.  (Think of a snail with arthritis).  After riding with your face in the cucumber plants for a few hours it was actually a nice change to get off the machine and pick the old way, even with the sore back included.
With our work ethic firmly established, and tons of cucumbers harvested, my sister was able to buy her car – a used silver Chevy that Dad promptly painted dark blue at her request.   My horse also became a reality – a six-month-old chestnut quarter horse filly, (no painting required), that I named Cherokee and proceeded to train.  
I never knew how many cucumbers I had to pick, or the back-pain I had to endure to get Cherokee, but she was most definitely worth it all, and unlike Stompin’ Tom, my back didn’t ache when I called her name.  ◊