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| Copyright 2015 AJ Horton |
Hello on Tuesday. As promised, this is the cotton that comes from the flower (square) and forms in the pod (boll). It is fluffy like cotton candy and white. It has a hard outer shell, though, that will hurt you. My grandmother would tell us stories about picking cotton. It seems her family were basically seasonal workers on farms and picking cotton was one of their seasons for many years. Grandma would tell us how hard it was to labor on the farm and how the cotton shells would cut their hands. She wasn't complaining (she never would), she was speaking matter-of-factly, and was just giving us information about her childhood and life. She seemed to enjoy her childhood - she was a "'daddy's girl" - and whatever he wanted her to do, she was more than happy to please. I enjoyed Grandma's stories and believed her of course, but, I never really realized just how hard her childhood and later life was of picking cotton until I saw cotton still on the plant, up close and personal, many years later. I have actually tried to get cotton out of one of those pods and it ain't easy folks. You think you can just grab and go but if you do that, you will get cut - and you don't want blood on that white cotton!
Now-a-days machines are used to harvest cotton. Sometimes, the plants are sprayed with some chemical to kill the leaves to make it easier for the machines to harvest the cotton. That just seems wrong to me but I guess it makes it easier on the machines. Gone are the days when people had a hand in harvesting. Still, cotton is as pretty and as useful as it was back in my grandmother's era. It's just not harvested the same.
I hope you had a terrific Tuesday. Thanks for looking. See you tomorrow.
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