As mentioned earlier, Daddy left about an acre of the cotton
for the family to pick. Picking cotton
was a way to make a small amount of spending money and when I say small amount
– I mean it. I could pick cotton all day
long and only make eighteen cents. It
takes lots of cotton to have any weight at all and Daddy only paid us three
cents a pound. However, by the end of
the summer, my sister, Scherri, and I usually had enough to buy a few records
at the Five Star Market on the edge of town.
This market was more like a variety store, as they carried everything
from food to hardware.
Once Daddy got the cotton picker, we all wanted to ride on
it. The seat was way up in the air, so
what a view! We could take turns going
with him once in awhile. The platform
wasn’t big enough to take many of us at one time.
This is the cotton picker
When we weren’t picking cotton or riding on the cotton picker, we loved to climb into the trailers of new cotton. They had straight ladders up the side and once you reached the top, you could dive in. It was so soft and bouncy, even if a cotton boll or twig stuck you now and then. The cotton trailers were off limits though, as was the hay barn and a couple of other barns. We always wondered why the fun stuff had restrictions.
It was also great fun to ride in the back of the corn
trailer and dodge the ears flying out.
The machine that picked them carried them up a shoot that spit them out
into the trailer. We would be dirty from
all those husks and it would itch like the devil, nevertheless, we couldn’t
wait to get in there again.
After those days, we really wished for a good old
thunderstorm to cool us off and give us a ditch to wade in.
