Orange Baseball (Prompt #45)

How do you pick oranges off of a tree that is at least three times as tall as you and twenty times as wide?  Very slowly, painfully, and monotonously.  And when there are two trees you are in for a long, sun-kissed day.  All the oranges have to come off so the blossoms can have room to grow.  If the blossoms don't grow, we won't get oranges next year.  At this point, early in the picking day with no end in sight, that isn't looking like such a bad thing.

Cue the action.  Orange picking day has become a family event, and my family does not tolerate boredom. Dad has his baseball glove on and Taylor, my brother, is standing on the roof of the house on one side of the tree.  I'm standing on the roof of a lower shed behind the tree.  Everybody is in position; let the games begin.

I'm picking oranges off the back of the tree and Taylor has a long wire picker so he can reach the ones on the top from the roof.  We are haphazardly throwing oranges as fast as we can down to my dad, who is managing to catch every one and neatly bag them.  But he could only keep up his master baseball skills for so long.  Soon, with oranges raining down on him from every direction he became overwhelmed.  "Calling in backup!"  Next thing I knew Taylor had hurled himself off the roof and was tag-teaming with my dad.

"Hey, Kayla!" he yelled.  "What's the hold up?"  Snotty 15-year-old.  I'll show him.  I began chucking oranges at him as fast as I could until he begged for mercy, at which point I climbed down from the shed and walked around to find a front yard littered with oranges.

"While you guys get caught up on bagging those, I'll check on the juicing inside," I said half mocking, and I grabbed two bags of oranges to make the delivery to the next station: the kitchen.  Inside I found my sister Tori hacking oranges in half with a giant butcher knife at a hazardous speed and my mom juicing the oranges like the world was ending.  They had an incredibly efficient assembly line going to the rhythm of Tori's upbeat playlist that was blasting over the speakers.  I tried yelling over the loud juicer but it was no use so I added my two bags of oranges to the other ominous twelve bags sitting on the ground and headed outside to another riveting round of sticky orange baseball.