Picking Stone Fruit Is Not a Crime

Picking Stone Fruit Is Not a Crime

This past week, I read that President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is keeping the migrant workforce from showing up to work. An increasingly urgent labor crisis could leave cherries rotting in the field, and farmers holding the bill.

My mind travels to cherries: the chokecherry wine we drank getting ready for my first wedding, the same week my fiancé revealed to me that he’d been seeing another woman throughout our engagement. The miniature cherry pies my current husband brings home from Wegmans, even though I tell him I’m trying to manage my A1C. The cherry liqueur I discovered in Utah, a craft cocktail game changer.

Then, I watch a TikTok video showing elementary school children standing in zip ties as their mother is arrested at immigration court. "Pressed & dressed," said the woman reporting on the event—a little girl in her Sunday best, ribbons streaming from her hair. I beat myself up for thinking of cherries while children are standing in zip ties and harken back to my grandmother’s citizenship hearing.

Grandma was a spitfire of a woman: short, round, and teeming with tenacity. She came to this country in the belly of a boat with three small children, my mother just five months old. Grandma learned how to speak a new language, read the local newspaper, and write some, too, all whilst raising seven children amid the Great Depression.

Claiming one’s citizenship in the United States was (and is) a very big deal. When it came time for my grandmother to claim hers, she struggled to answer some of the questions posed to her. Grandma approached the bench, looked at the judge, and in the broken English we all came to love, said, “Watcha you wanna from me? My husband fight in WW1, I raise seven children, and I gotta two boys in the army.” There were probably a few more choice words in there, too, but that’s the essence of the story I’ve been told. The judge looked at her and said, “Okay, Josephine, you can sit down now. You have your citizenship.”

There were no zip ties, no threats of deportation on the whim of a psychopath who eats performative cruelty for breakfast. Grandma raised her kids, Grandpa spent his days digging ditches, and immigrants were, at the very least, “useful” if not revered.


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Note: The title of this piece was inspired by a wonderful Substack writer I recently discovered. Check out Gravy Is Not a Crime by Golden Camel