In High Cotton

Not a breath of air stirred

over the free and open prairie;

the clouds were like light piles of cotton;

and where the blue sky was visible,

it wore a hazy and languid aspect.

-Francis Parkman

It's cotton pickin' time in north Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. The time of year - beginning in late October - when the harvesters descend upon the prairies and dusty cotton fields like grasshoppers did Egypt... scurrying and hopping everywhere... gobbling up everything in sight, leaving only tall sticks and spindly stumps behind.

It's another world up here. Up here in high cotton. Tufts of the bloomed, land-grown marvel blow across streets and make pillowy piles at curbs and gutters. A good strong wind is likely to hurry both tumbleweeds and wisps of cotton at you. They sail through the air here instead of leaves, striking you with the feeling that you're glassed inside dusty, cotton-balled snow globe. Strange feeling. Makes you want to wear calico skirts and dark, pointy-toed boots and be Mary Poppins, carrying a parasol to shield you from the wind, tumbleweeds, and cotton. Or at least float you above them.

Cotton really is magical. It's the strangest thing you've ever seen hanging from a plant. Or picked from a plant. I'm wondering if I can snag a cotton-producing wonder or two to take back with me to Freeman House. Don't know why, except I think it would be wonderful to look out my tall, tall windows and see both roses and cotton blowing in the wind.

Ah, okay. Maybe not. But it would still be interesting to grow cotton one year. If only to pretend you're a millennium Mary Poppins, bringing home-grown stuffed stuffies and spoonfuls of sugar to lonely, bored children.

I've been a terrible tour guide of late. Sorry. But I did want to take you out to show you the cotton. The high cotton.

It's a marvelous, strange place, that gives a strange, marvelous feeling. You'd know what I mean. If you were standing here alongside me this morning, watching it all sail by, you'd know what I mean.