A nice autumn day

Leaves are yellow or red or brown, the larger oak leaves falling now; smaller gum and maple and others soon to follow.

The ground is wet. For several days, low clouds and intermittent hours-long light rain dominated the weather.

Today is a sunny day. I should be outside, chopping grass from a crosstie-banked ditch in the front yard. I have two different kinds of hoes to do the chopping. One is a regular yard hoe; the other a double-sided device with a pick on one side and an almost grubbing hoe on the other.

You get a hoe sharpened right, you can chop some grass. Like everything else, though, the sharp wears down and you have to take a file to the hoe again.

My mother used to talk about chopping cotton. The first time she mentioned it, I wondered what the idea was, chopping cotton plants. I thought people picked cotton from the plants, and how could they if they chopped down the plants? My mother just laughed and said chopping cotton meant using a hoe to chop grass and weeds.

Years ago, all that was done by hand. Nobody had chemicals to keep weeds away. Picking was done by hand, too.

Cotton was an intensely labor-intensive crop. That is why Southern states had slaves. Land right for planting cotton and hot weather right for growing led to large fields, huge fields, the ones today that grow soybeans or rice.

My mother’s people – Andersons and Simmons -- didn’t have large fields or, way back when, slaves to plant and chop and pick cotton. It had been that way since the first landings and moving west … one of the Carolinas to Georgia to Alabama to Texas.

My father’s people – Merrimans and Flatts, Wards and Ishes -- had it the same way, but by a different route – Virginia to Tennessee to Kentucky to Indian Territory to Texas.

My wife’s people, too; both sides – Johnstons in Virginia moving to Kentucky, then to Texas, the Chickasaw Nation, back to Texas and then to Arkansas; Raleys from South Carolina to Alabama to Arkansas.

They all were tenant farmers, until the 1920s or 1940s, renting land for a year, maybe for another year, growing enough to eat, raising enough cotton to make a bale at the local gin.

Funny thing, that one bale of cotton would pay a year’s worth of bills. What they needed was two bales. That kind of money would buy a small farm.