“There’s no place hotter in September than a cotton field in Texas!”
You realize the credence of such as you are figuratively and fully immersed within the quotations, sun beating down unmercifully on the tops of your booted feet, reflecting off of the bolls and the dry and cracked blackland soil and swirling back upwards in a great and undulating refraction of the visible light, bending and swaying on that Gawd-awfully hot southerly breeze and rippling across the landscape of a beyond-sweltering Texas afternoon.
And as the perspiration rolls down your back and cascades freely from your armpits, little respite is to be had in the hot breath of a not-so-fading summer as it gently laps at your sweat-dampened shirt, and any minor reprieve that might be found is tempered with the knowledge that the mercury is well on its way to surpassing the 100-degree mark again. Even the cows know well enough to lay in the shade of the spreading live oaks in the adjacent pasture.
Yet you’ve chosen to stand directly exposed to all the harshness offered up in a land of extremes, where fortune hinges on the fickle nature of nature itself:
Two years ago, the torrential rains of Hurricane Harvey hammered the Clark farm near Lockhart, Texas and decimated the cotton crop in this very field, drenching the bolls and shredding them into sodden fibers of uselessness, rendering it a total loss.
But today, September 10th, 2019 it is thriving in a field that has not seen measurable rainfall in almost three months. When the patch is harvested three days from now, it will yield four large rectangular bales that will be shipped off to the Lockhart Gin Company in town, and Mr. Clark will be pleased.
And, at the end of that day, as he dabs at the sweat on his brow and relaxes with Mrs. Clark on the front porch of the farmhouse…
It will still be hotter than hell.
Rick Malo©2019
We’re down on Union Pacific’s Lockhart Subdivision at 12:44 on September 10th, 2019, and three BNSF 9-44CWs, led by number 4775, have southbound tonnage on the drawbar as they ripple through the heat waves at MP40.25 and roll over the undulating terrain of the Clark farm two miles west of Lockhart, Texas.