This article was originally published by Oregon Public Broadcasting.

September is grape harvest season in the Willamette Valley. For Maria de Lourdes Navarro and her adult son, David Montiel, that means: Wake up at 5 a.m., brew some coffee, pack lunch and be at the job site by seven in the morning. There, they’ll haul heavy buckets of grapes that they cut by hand.

And they’ll usually be back home by early afternoon. How long they work depends on how many boxes the vineyard needs that day, Navarro said.

“When we get back [home], we wash our dirty gloves. And work clothes need to be set aside. We don’t have a washing machine here. So we have to go do laundry elsewhere,” she said while sitting at her dining room table in her apartment.

She’ll usually cook and be in bed by 8 p.m., ready

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