Time of the Harvest

A year has gone by

Cotton, Soy and Tobacco

A year ago today I was in Falcon, NC by my father’s side as he took his last breath. For the nearly two weeks before that day, I stayed by his side, only leaving to go pick up food. Driving around the countryside near Dunn on the edge of Cumberland County I passed by the ripe fields of cotton, soy beans and tobacco. The harvest weighing heavy, so close to being reaped. Bringing up memories of walking with him in fields like these in the fall when they were bare ground.

Spreading out in every direction from my hometown these three crops ring the city like the sea surrounding an island. Staring out of the car window as a child I watched them whiz past, flashing row after row, like a lenticular image that you could never fully see. I had wanted to stop and admire them, look deeply, burn their image in my mind to take with me as I moved on, but my priority was to be with my dad, so I would drive quickly to and from so as not to leave him alone for but the most essential necessities.

On that final day, he passed in the afternoon, I didn’t know quite what to do with myself or where I should go. Like a boat untethered suddenly drifting after its anchor is severed. So I drove out to the fields and stopped and looked at the crops and thought about all the harvests that came before and about the one soon coming. I looked deeply at the plants that grew on this land, in the fields I walked with my father. Then I got in the car and drove away.

"I used to work in the cotton fields a lot when I was young. There were a lot of African Americans working out there. A lot of Mexicans - the blacks and the whites and the Mexicans, all out there singing, and it was like an opera in the cotton fields, and I can still hear it in the music that I write and play today."

– Willie Nelson

Cotton

Tobacco

Soy Beans

Land and Sky