Alice
Thursday, May 1, 2008
IN FIFTY-FIVE YEARS on the home place we ain’t never missed putting in a crop, and I don’t intend to miss one now. No matter what them three say. Why, we planted cotton the week Wilton got back from Korea. And the year it snowed the first of May. And the time when Dee Anna was six months old and we carried her out here in a apple crate.
There’s something about a fresh plowed field that gets to you. Makes your heart ache. All them even rows, perfect and clean, not a weed in sight. Terraces purty as a picture. Sun coming up over the breaks, wind a-blowin’ across the plains, fe’lark singing in that mesquite tree there.
He used to say this place was too sorry to run cattle on and too dry to farm. But we made it. Some years we nearly went broke, some years we had a little to put by. It’s harder these days, what with all the talk of irrigation running out. And harder now they don’t let you catch your own seed and you have to buy it from the farm supply. How anybody can own a patent on a plant God Himself invented is beyond me. Nothing ever stays the same, though, does it?
I’m gonna sit here and finish this Thermos of coffee and listen out for Hector on the tractor. And then I guess I’ll drive on back to the house.
I’m all right, Wilton. I can manage.
I won’t let you down. I promise.