Day 5, Kay: Happy October from West Texas

Happy October, everyone, from The Working Writer and The Paragraph Ranch.

With the calendar turning toward autumn, I can’t help but remember my earliest memories of the season. Growing up on a cotton farm brings back very different recollections of fall. Autumn meant picking cotton.

The year I turned six was a triumph for me when I was big enough to join the family in pulling those fluffy white bolls from the plants. We had just moved to town from the farm but still had to go back and harvest one last crop. One October afternoon after school, we four kids changed into working clothes and rode with our parents out to the field to pick cotton.

I was too small to haul a traditional white cotton bag, but pulled a burlap tow sack instead. By sunset I had picked 58 pounds—more than my own weight—and enjoyed the kudos from all.

When we drove back into town to our new house, children were running across the streets in costumes, and I didn’t know what that meant. My parents explained that it was Halloween, and “town kids” got dressed up and went door-to-door asking for candy.

“And they get it?” I asked in wonder.

Those days were a lot more isolated on the farm. Now with media immersion, no child escapes commercial culture. But I was the poster child for rural naivete.

My dad stopped at a store on the way to our house for milk and bread and bought one of the biggest bags of candy I had ever seen. It even had wax teeth in it. “Here, this is for y’all,” Mama said, opening and offering the bag around.

“How many pieces do we get?” my brother said, as was the norm for our frugal family.

“All of it,” Mama said. “Pass it around and share.”

Fall always brings back memories of this moment, this gentle kindness and sense of largesse. It can take so little sometimes to make a person happy.