Cotton Field

Each summer my parents would take us to my grandfather’s ranch in Southern Texas to help with different jobs. It might be branding cattle, digging fence post holes, or picking cotton! My parents had told us stories about the cotton fields as I grew up. I wasn't old enough yet to partake in this miserable job. One fine morning my brothers and I were awakened before daylight dressed, fed, and taken a mile down to the cotton fields! We were handed heavy cotton ducking sacks, they were over twice as long as I was. Diligently we all started filling our sacks with cotton. Under the hot summer day sun, which was beating down? The field was elegantly plowed with neat rows, lined with brown dried plants, with beautiful fluffy white soft cotton and seeds in bolls. A protective vessel that does its job with sharp burrs that make picking cotton by hand quite painful, and bloody. I walked up and down the cotton rows dragging my heavy sack. With blistering sun overheating my body, I had begun to ache, getting weaker, the sack got heavier every minute My hands had swollen up with cuts that were bleeding from removing the cotton out of the bolls. After a while I started feeling faint, running a fever, heaving, and then I collapsed to the soft plowed black soil. My family runs over wondering what had gone wrong. I had developed heat-stroke! I was never again brought back to the cotton fields. ©By: Eve Roper 12/8/2014 Contest Name : Jobs 12/ 11/2014 Honorable Mention