The harvest
When we were kids growing
up in the hill country of the state of Arkansas we were a very poor family of
six people so during the summer we would take the bare essentials and go over
to the state of Missouri to work the cotton crops, we would work for a cotton
farmer with several hundred acres of cotton in the rich Mississippi delta
bottom lands which was level land commonly called the boot heal of Missouri. We
would be furnished with a house to live in from spring until late fall. So we
would arrive in
We would work long hours
through the heat chopping grass out of the tender cotton down rows that would
be a quarter mile long, by the time we were through all the fields it would be
time to start over in the original field we had started in and so on we would
work on into the summer until the stalks began to produce green bowls of cotton
and upon ripening the cotton would begin to burst forth from the bowls which
covered the green stalks and then it became the back breaking labor of dragging
a sack capable of holding 100 lbs of cotton down the rows as we hand picked the
white tufts of cotton from the bowls.
And so on we labored through the summer caring
for and harvesting the precious cotton crops. Soon, after about the third
picking we knew that it would be “bowl pulling time”. What this consisted of
was that the season would render the stalks too barely producing and the stalks
would begin to blacken, turn brittle and begin to die but there would be some
life left in them and they would produce sort of a small bowl with poor cotton
quality and so instead of picking the cotton we would pull bowl and all off the
stalk in order to reap the last bit of cotton.
It was grueling work
pulling those bowls, the sharp end of the tough bowls would make our fingers
bleed and the sacks were twice as heavy. So we would pull bowls and as the
cotton trailers pulled away with the last load, we knew that the season was
over, our work done and we would be going home.
My friends, I feel as
though we are in the time described above, the season has grown late and we are
in the final harvesting days. As my memory travels back over the years to those
fields “White to harvest” I can visualize the true meaning of
We must encourage
ourselves and one another for the end of harvest is sure to come.
Darrel Bird
