so there you are you’re fourteen or fifteen years old and you’re hoping to do something nice to help out your family you go to work with your father you’re working in the countryside in the summertime you watch fruit ripen peaches pears you take care of the trees and the fruit you water them you spray them you prune them you work until you’re ready to drop but then it turns out you have to dump it all you have load up the trailer and take all the fruit to the dump because it can’t be sold the price is too low or else because the requirements of the companies that purchase fruit in volume to can it or bottle it are too strict they want perfect apples or peaches they want fruit that looks like it was hand carved and hand painted so that it turns into an incredible chore to have to select and discard the rejects so the best thing to do is just gather up all the fruit and throw it all away in that period I was a practicing fundamentalist Catholic one hundred percent unwavering I was opposed to waste and I still am but I had different reasons for it back then I used to think it was a sin because there were people dying of hunger in the Third World and instead of transforming this stuff into fruit juices or canned fruit and giving it to the hungry we were plowing it into the ground it seemed like an atrocity

so one day you climb onto your fine powerful tractor and set off the collection centers are all at least fifteen miles from your land now fifteen miles by car takes just a few minutes but with a tractor that goes maybe ten miles an hour on a straightaway it takes a good two hours it’s summer you’re driving your tractor on the way you pass people heading for the beach laughing shouting with girls and brightly colored T shirts and music pounding loud and there you sit patiently driving your mud caked tractor with all the fruit in the trailer behind you it’s already starting to ferment and stink and finally you arrive at the collection center in front of you is a line of tractors pulling trailers waiting their turn you take your place in line behind the last tractor you usually arrive there late in the afternoon because you’ve already been up working all day in the countryside work starts at four in the morning and you work until eleven thirty or noon because in the summer in an orchard you can’t stand the heat any later than that so you start working at four that is you get out into the fields before the sun comes up we would go out to the fields with my mother who’d bring pizza di scarola agrodolce a sweet and sour escarole pizza the way she makes it and with a sister or two and a lot of times when we got to the orchard we’d have to wait for the sky to lighten it was still pitch dark and we’d have to sit waiting in the car for half an hour