Delta Dirt

Delta Dirt By Patrick Kelly I think back through years long past, when I was a child. I looked across cotton fields that ran a country mile Cotton grew in all the fields, the old house sat on one end, In front, an old cottonwood tree, in the back, a river bend. I can see my grandfather, as my mind wanders back to long ago, sitting on the porch steps, a file in one hand, in the other a hoe. My grandmother in the kitchen, the smell of ham and eggs, Biscuits, hot and buttered, on a table with square legs. Then all those Sunday dinners, chicken piled high on a plate, vegetables, fresh from the garden, men and children ate first, the women would wait. The life of a cotton farmer, a family that got up before the morning light, In the fields by sunrise, sitting on the porch at night. Picking time would come around and I picked in my little tow sack, Thirty pounds I could pick, a lot of weight for a little boy’s back. We never knew times were hard, there was hunting and fishing too. I still remember my first shotgun, a 410 hand me down, I thought it new Times spent hunting under the river hill and a sling-shot shooting at jars My brother riding that old bicycle, I sat on the handle bar. Winter was time to kill a hog, in the smokehouse hams would hang. We drank water from a bucket, fresh from an artesian spring. So, when I think back to those days, why do they seem so neat? Wonder, if I could go back to that delta dirt under my feet? .