November 8, 1979
It’s going to one of these nights… maybe tonight.
I mean really FROST—not just this little icin’ on the cake kind but one of those lay-it-on-us—almost-snow-kind.
Back when I was a kid I sure hated to see that first frost come ’cause it meant that Poppa would go visit old George who would be hired to come with his team of ugly horses and plow up our acre of sweet potatoes.
Don’t get me wrong! I dearly loved sweet tators and still do.
I just didn’t like to get out there and pick them up!
You see that land was a good deal like McBroom’s Farm which is a children’s book about a man who had a one-acre farm that could grow anything over night.
A shovel got left in the farmland one night and it grew so much that they took enough lumber out of it the next day to build a new house—with plenty left over to shingle the outhouse.
Well, those sweet tators seemed to be like Mr. McBroom’s farm.
We started out with one little bitty acre of tators layin’ right pretty on the top of the ground.
But by the time we’d bent our backs and picked those little orange jewels up for a couple of hours, that acre grew to be a whole section of land, each tator weighed ten pounds, and there were TONS of them.
After a few years I finally did get smart—maybe I should say connivin’—because when the weather man called for the first BIG frost, I slid the dining room chair across the floor, crawled up on it and began to reach to the top shelf of the cabinet where Mother stored her ancient cookbook.
It was time for MY preparations for tator picking days.
Poppa liked a good coconut pie, and I discovered that if I mentioned staying in the house to cook up a bunch of pies, I could stay out of that acre of tators.
And dear hearts, I would have baked pies ’til they overflowed the house AND the barn to keep from having to get DIRT under my fingernails!
Scarlett O’Hara was my heroine, and she only got her hands dirty when there wasn’t any other way out!
I had a way out! Never did dawn on me, though, that perhaps I was such a terrible picker upper that Poppa deliberately let me con him out of going to the fields! ?!?!?