When GrandmaWas A Little Girl - #34

Story #34 - Picking cotton – Ouch!

Have you ever picked cotton?

I had mentioned in another story that we had irrigation ditches close by our house. There were two cotton fields that grew close by. We lived on the edge of town and there were areas that had large fields. One was across the street from where we lived and another one was on the west side of our house. Both of those fields were cotton fields. They also grew cotton across town from us.

When I was little I liked to watch the farmer with his tractor plow up the long furrows (rows) of dirt. When the cotton plants started to pop up through the dirt and get a little taller, it always looked so neat! Then as the plants got taller they would get buds on them. This would be the cotton bud. It would be a green pod and as it matured it would turn brown and when it was ready to pick the pod would be hard,brittle and dried and would ‘pop open’! The pods were sharp and prickly and the cotton would be white and soft and had a seed buried in the cotton fluff.

They would hire Mexicans to pick that cotton. I was curious one day and walked over to the cotton field and picked a few cotton buds. OUCH! When those hulls were dried and open, you had to be careful because the hulls on the ends were sharp! I then understood what the song meant about picking your fingers to the bone! You had to wear gloves and if you didn't your fingers would bleed!

There was a cotton gin across town across the railroad tracks. The gin would separate the cotton from the seeds. When you picked a piece of cotton from the plant it had a seed in it. My mom would go over to the mills for ‘cast offs’. That is not the correct name but I can’t think of the right one. It was leftovers that the mill did not want. My mother would buy several bags of it for real cheap. I don’t know what she paid for it except that it was cheap. She would use our cat brush (we had cats and brushed their fur with the brush) to comb the seeds out of the cotton. We would help her brush the seeds out of the cotton. That was a hard job too. Your fingers would get sore because if you were not careful when you brushed the seeds from the cotton, the brush pricked your fingers and that hurt! You would use one hand to hold the handful of cotton and use the other hand with the brush and brush through the cotton to remove the seeds. My mom made us homemade quilts and used that cotton for the batting she put in the quilts. Those quilts sure kept us warm and toasty!