The farmer has to be an optimist, or he wouldn’t still be a farmer – Will Rogers, American actor (1879-1935)
Sopping, and with no sign of stopping, either-then a breather. Warm again, storm again-what is norm, again? It’s fine, it’s not, it’s suddenly hot: Boom, crash, lightning, Flash! Unknown
The leaves fall, the wind blows, and the farm country slowly changes from the summer cottons into its winter woods. – Henry Beston, American writer & naturalist (1888-1968)
September used to be when we returned to school. By Labor Day we were wearing flannels and knee socks. Football was up and going. The stadium was full, the game was going well, we were jumping up and down shouting our cheerleader slogans and so on. Just then a referee ran by. His hat came off at the sideline, he kept going. When he returned, I was waiting there holding his hat. He shook his head, smiled and took the hat. Turned out he had marked where the player went out of bounds with the hat. Moral of the story: Do not pick up the referee’s hat.
All that to say, it’s fall and it’s football. Each season has its own way of providing new sights and sounds, slowly changing temperatures, rain showers with rolling thunder. Maybe you rearrange your summer closet into a fall closet from the clothing you put away last year. If last year’s clothing is not appealing any longer it can be dropped off at a thrift store to be sold or make a donation to charity.
Food sources are changing as well. For the first time since last year, I made a dish of red beans and rice. It was a warm meal and filling. A few can soups were stashed into the cupboard for a quick need of something warm later. At the house there’s always bags of frozen and cleaned fish that will last all year long for any season.
Across the Prairie we’ve seen the harvesting of grain and hay. The whole system of gathering and moving humongous trucks passing by full of corn as well the movement of hay bales is amazing. Cotton fields will probably come out later. Before the mechanization of equipment for harvesting the crops were harvested by hand. By 1930 tractors were being introduced replacing hand and animal power. By 1940’s International Harvester developed the first effective mechanical cotton picker. Post WWII, mechanics accelerated fast.
Today even more modern methods have changed farming: large air-conditioning tractors, self-propelled combines for corn, soybeans, and rice. Sophisticated mechanical cotton pickers, precision agriculture technology including autonomous equipment.
Most of this mechanical information came from AI; the rest came from me looking out the window, or watching the trucks go by the gravel road. As a child I grew up at the edge of a cotton field. I climbed up to my window at night and watched the cotton pickers all lit up like a carnival. In time everything changes. Be the change that you wish to see in the world.
Shannon Bardwell is a writer living quietly in the Prairie. Email reaches her at [email protected].
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