you want fries with that name?

Before your tongue tangles trying to say my name: The first rhymes with “bone.” For the last name think about a juicy hamburger grilled to perfection. Just before it’s slid onto a sesame seed bun, someone opens up a plain Hershey candy bar and lays it on top.
Not a HAMburger. Not even a CHEESEburger, but a HERSHberger. (The first Hershbergers were German Amish-Mennonites who immigrated in the early 1800s. My husband’s grandmother was Old Order Amish.)
Originally, I am from the southern tier of the state of New York, the Finger Lake region: Rolling hills, covered with green trees through the summer and lots of sledding in the winter. I grew up thinking that a ‘creek’ was an exotic waterway found in England. We called it a ‘crick’ and went there to ‘wersh-up’ after a day of helping in the hay fields.
I began high school in southern New York, but my father had a yen to discover the land of Zane Grey, so we moved to southern Arizona where I began the 11th grade. A couple months later we moved to Southern Utah. But, by my senior year I was back in northern Arizona, where I graduated.
Probably it was my ‘yen’ to know more stability that led me to a Mennonite college in northern Indiana where I met my husband at a local church. We bought a ‘carpenter’s dream’ (nightmare) and spent the next 10 years remodeling it. When it became livable, my husband accepted a job in El Dorado.
We bought a house so new they had not finished building it.
When we moved to southern Arkansas in 1982, my three sons used my mnemonic device to introduce themselves at school. They came home with nicknames straight from the fast-food restaurant: Hamburger, Cheeseburger and French Fries. I asked what their baby sister was called. They thought a minute and said, “Strawberry Shake.”
Hamburger’s and Cheeseburger’s excitement when they attended SouthArk’s Children’s College reminded me of the ‘fun’ of learning. I enrolled Strawberry Shake in preschool and  began classes at SouthArk and SAU-Magnolia. It took four years of hamburger suppers, but I did graduate. Maybe because I attended so many high schools, my four years as a nontraditional ‘older’ student in the SAU system made this place feel like home.
When Strawberry Shake entered kindergarten, I noticed that she had no place to pretend to cook hamburgers. I volunteered my husband’s carpentry skill to build kitchenettes for each kindergarten room. We lived with sawdust for a while, but by the second semester, Strawberry could play house at school.
Hamburger and Cheeseburger are now off to college. One went to Razorback country, the other to Mardi Gras City, French Fries has a couple more years of high school and Strawberry Shake enters junior high this year.
In time, the nicknames were replaced with others and southern talk replaced northern accents. When we visited up North recently, the grandparents are amused with their grandchildren’s southern ways.
Meaning, I suppose that they do not say ‘wersh’ and ‘crick’ as I used to say. Nicest compliment I heard the entire visit.