Cranberry Moms

Marty setting up an experiment using light traps.

This year the UMass Cranberry Station celebrates it’s 100 year anniversary. For those outside of the cranberry industry, this may not seem like super exciting news. But for those of us who are, the Station has been vital to our survival. I know first hand the critical role the Station has played in helping to maintain not only an industry but with my own life. Here’s my story:

The day I came home with my driver’s license, my father looked at me and said “Well done, kid” and handed over the keys to my first car; a red, 1988 Ford Festiva. As we got in the car and began driving down the driveway, myself in the driver’s seat and my father in the passenger seat, life as I knew it was about to change.

We ended up at the UMass Cranberry Station, a place I had been to a thousand times before. I had often come with my dad when he went to ask the researchers questions about a bug or some strange phenomenon he had discovered out on the bog. As a child, I had spent hours lounging in chairs in the Station library reading books, waiting for my parents to finish a meeting or whatever they were there for. Honestly, I knew the place was super important and that the people who worked there were on my parent’s “favorite” list, but other than that I never gave it all a second thought. So here I was: seventeen, a driver’s license in my wallet, my first car, and my father telling me, “now you walk in there and ask for Dr. Anne Averill and tell her you want to work for her and that you’ll do anything she wants you to do.” Okay, maybe that wasn’t exactly what he said or what happened. But to my sensitive teenage memory, it was close.

I remember walking down the hall towards Dr. Averill’s office like it was yesterday. It was in the middle of the winter and I was freezing, shaking from nervousness, and completely clueless of what I was about to say or do. I knocked on the Entomology Lab door and asked for the doctor. Instead I received Marty, Dr. Averill’s assistant, and forever faithful sister. She interviewed me right there, or I should say interrogated, and that was that. I don’t remember much more except that she was much shorter than me, that we both wore the exact same shirt, and that she defied intimidation.

I got the job and began as soon as school let out. Nothing could have prepared me for what I would learn the next four summers I worked there. My world changed completely. I learned quickly that Marty and Dr. Averill are both very talented, smart individuals who I learned to love, respect, and admire. Under her wing, Marty taught me the unique science behind Entomology and how to observe and examine the world as a scientist. As we worked out on the cranberry bogs, she opened my eyes to not only how amazingly unique cranberries are, but also that the people growing them were some the most beautiful and wisest of souls. I also had the opportunity to work with several graduate students, assisting them with their research. I learned about their own passions for beetles, bugs, and other such fine legged creatures. With their supervision, Marty and Dr. Averill even helped me coordinate my own research study which I submitted to the Senior High School Science Fair and won first place.

The Station opened up my world view. The experience gave me confidence in ways that would stay with me throughout my life. Eventually, I left the Station and continued on with my education. Life then took me into new, unexpected, and often times painful adventures. Looking back now, I can see how my time spent at the Station was critical in helping me survive what would be a very dark time. After about ten years, I returned home to Massachusetts and began to pick up the pieces of what was a broken life.

In my recovery, I turned to what I knew best, the cranberry bogs. With help from family, friends, and especially from those at the Station, I began to work as an Integrated Pest Management Consultant, scouting with my mom up to two thousand acres a week throughout the growing season. Those at the Station kept their doors open and I kept returning with questions, observations, and mostly just simply cranberry chit-chat. Every time I jumped a ditch, swept my net, looked at a cranberry, and talked with a grower, a wound was being healed.

Soon I was able to purchase my own home and several acres of cranberry bogs. I moved on from being a consultant to a Research and Development Technician at the A.D. Makepeace Company. Often times I would lay awake at night and wonder how I ended up with the perfect job, a beautiful, peaceful home, and in a community I love and can call my own. And it only got better.

On August 30, 2008, on my parents cranberry farm, I married a kind loving soul, my husband Michael. The wedding was beyond anything I had ever dreamed of. Family and friends surrounded us as we exchanged vows overlooking a light pink bed of cranberries. My heart overflowed with joy and gratitude as I looked around and saw dear friends from the Station, raising their glasses in toast of the celebration. “No,” I thought, “it is I who should be toasting you!”.

Michael and I on our wedding day at my parents cranberry farm.