Picking Cotton

I know I go from one subject to something entirely different and when I was reading up on blogs, they said, don't do this...but I would be bored stiff and so would any potential readers (in my opinion) if I stuck to one topic. So,here we go.

I grew up on a farm in the Northeast Corner of Alabama in a little town near Scottsboro.  The early years of my life were spent on this farm.  My granddaddy planted cotton and in the summer, we hoed or chopped cotton (got all of the weeds out) and in the fall, we picked the cotton.  I loved picking cotton (well not in the early morning because the cotton was all wet from the dew).  Cotton is so fluffy and white; however, picking the cotton from the bow is very hard on the nails.  My Memma got up at the crack of dawn and cooked ham, eggs, red eye gravy and biscuits.  And, no, the biscuits were not from a can.  I would head to the fields with granddaddy and we would gather our cotton sacks and at the age of five, I could carry two rows (that is pick from a row of cotton on the left of me and a row on my right).  Those rows could be mighty long, too. 
Memma would come out to pick after she cleaned the breakfast dishes and put stuff on to cook for lunch.  Right before dinner time (dinner is lunch in the South and dinner time is called supper) she would go to the house and finish up dinner.  Wow, we would take our sacks, filled with cotton, to the wagon and weigh it (I got paid so much per pound of cotton).  Then, we would head to the  house and eat fried corn, fried okra, pinto beans, cornbread, fresh tomatoes, onions, coldslaw and God only knows what else.  We usually had a fresh peach or apple cobbler for dessert.  And, of course, a glass of sweet tea. 

One of these days I am going to go into detail and post Memma's recipes.  You know, she had a recipe for Poor Man's Cobbler.  When I asked what that was, she said when she and my Granddaddy lived in a community called Boxes Cove and the only thing they had for a grocery store was a Rolling Store (a grocery store on wheels) they sometimes ran out of fruit for a cobbler, so she made a Poor Man's Cobbler.  There was no fruit in the cobbler and she used vinegar.  It tasted just like Apple Cobbler.

Back to my story, after dinner, we would go back to the fields and pick until dark (or as my Granddaddy would say, "we'll pick till dusk settles".  Then, we would weigh one last time for the day, and go eat left overs for supper.

Those were the days, my friends.  Those were the days.  Memma and Granddaddy, you will live in my heart forever!