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It’s cotton pickin’ time

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the cotton got picked!
A small part of my neighbor’s cotton field
There are a lot of pretty sights out here. This is certainly one of them. 

The first fall we lived here was exceptionally wet. You can’t pick and bale cotton in the rain and mud.

From what I can tell, this has been a good year for cotton. Some cotton farmers are beginning to pick and bale. The bales are about the size of– maybe a little smaller than– train cars. They sit out in the fields until a field is completely picked, and then they get loaded up on large trucks. 
Contrary to what most people think, Mississippi– at least the parts we frequent– is a pretty clean place. There’s just not a lot of trash along the road side. What there is comes mostly from stuff blowing out of pickup truck beds. (In fact, there are radio and t.v. ads reminding people to not pitch trash in their truck beds for this reason.) If, however, you visited Mississippi soon after cotton picking time, you would think it’s filthy! What you’d identify as trash, though, would be cotton– cotton that’s blown off the bales as they travel down the highways.

I have more thoughts on cotton in Mississippi, but I’ve lost the context in which I first wrote them. I’ve got my cracker-jack research assistant– my son-in-law– (back-)tracking. If he comes up with anything, I’ll post later. But to give a hint, I calculated that if all of the cotton grown in my county went to make T-shirts, there’s enough to make 4,000,000 100% cotton T-shirts.