Daily Newspaper and Tourism Guide for Reeves County Trans Pecos, Big Bend of West Texas

OPINION

Opinion

Tuesday, November 25, 1997

Squarely

Pegged

Reminscing with friends

about the 'good old days'

Cotton white unto harvest, weeds taller than the cotton, sunflowers and Johnson grass lining the barrow ditches.

That's what I remember from my recent trip to Flomot. Fall is not a beautiful time of the year in farming country. In fact, it is depressing to me. Maybe I'm remembering all those years dragging a cotton sack up and down those rows, dodging dead careless weed that just itched to drop its seeds down my collar.

My brief visit to the ghost town's only meeting place - once the school cafeteria - did little to cheer me up. Farmers gathered around tables in the hall to hear extension people talk about herbicides and such. You wouldn't think that many people lived in the area, since the town is practically empty. But up there, families live on the land they farm.

I did get to see some people I grew up with and enjoyed a delicious fajita lunch with them. Roye Pigg, a cafe owner who grew up in the area after I left there, catered the lunch. And I sat with Ruth Skinner, the daughter of one of our landlords.

Ruth operates the only business left in Flomot. She and her husband sell insurance and operate the post office on a contract basis, while their son does the farming. We reminisced about the "good old days" when we lived on their place, in "Skinners' Shack" and farmed on the halves. (Halves is when the landlord provides the land, house and equipment, and the renter does all the work, taking half the proceeds of product sales.).

She remembers enjoying playing with the five of us, since she was the only child at home and lonely. We never got a chance to be lonely; just the opposite. I longed for a place to go for some privacy, and the platform on the windmill was my hideout. Ruth had planted some vines there, which eventually grew to cover most of the windmill. I loved climbing the ladder with a book to read or just lie in the shade of the vines to think.

When I'm six hours away from those cotton fields, warm memories make me want to go back to those "good old days." But when I see the fields close up, the not-so-warm memories surface, and I am glad to be where I am.

As aggravating as computers can be, I'd much rather contend with a keyboard than a cotton picker.

"A wise king winnows out the wicked; he drives the threshing wheel over them." Proverbs 20:26, NIV.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Peggy McCracken is an Enterprise writer and webmaster whose column appears each Tuesday. Her e-mail address is
news@pecos.net

Your View

Writer in Spain requests information on cotton

EDITOR'S NOTE: The Pecos Enteprise received this e-mail from Barcelona, Spain, from an individual who would like more information on the cotton production in Pecos and Reeves County. The e-mail is in Spanish, he explains that his writing in English is very poor. Francisco Masso reads the Pecos Enterprise through the internet. His request for the information on cotton, it's production and the technology has been answered.

Senores,
Para trabajo de literatura sobre Pecos y el condado de Reeves, precisaria urgente informacion sobre:

- Fecha de la recogida de algodon en Pecos
- Produccion anual
- Tecnologia moderna

Dispensen por no expresarme en su idioma, pues mi ingles escrito no es muy bueno.

Muchas Gracias.

Francisco Masso
Doctor en Filosofia y Escritor
GARBI, 167, 40, 3a
O8397-Pineda De Mar (Barcelona) Espana

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