Editor
Many sources attribute the origin of the phrase “in my mind’s eye” to Chaucer who used it in The Man of Law’s Tale in the 14th century. Shakespeare picked up the phrase in “Hamlet,” and today it’s a common idiom.
Having grown up in Concordia Parish in east-central Louisiana, I have a lot of memories involving cotton in my mind’s eye. When I sift through the files stored away in my head, the first one that pops up is getting lost in a cotton field as a young child while my parents were visiting some friends one afternoon. My mom rescued me although I wasn’t frightened. I was just having fun exploring the maze of brilliant white bolls.
Another clear image is of the grounds at my elementary school where my friends and I sat cross-legged in a grassy ditch near an adjacent cotton field during recess. From that vantage point, we watched a crop duster make slow turns in the sky, followed by quick, low passes across the top of the crop.
I can look back on myself standing in a field of tall, rank cotton on a hot and humid summer day before plant growth regulators were used. I remember the earthy smell of dark, gumbo clay following a pop-up shower that rolled through in the middle of the afternoon.
Another scene depicts driving through the thick canopy of pecan trees that lined each side of the lake road on the way to one of Dad’s fields where he was picking cotton. I can still smell the strong, chemical odor of defoliant in the air.
I can see the bright, lime green cone-shaped boll weevil traps placed around the perimeter of a cotton field to catch the pest that almost wiped out our industry.
In my mind’s eye, I have a view of folks standing at the counter at the John Deere store waiting on picker parts and can hear the sound of clacking keys coming from the Smith Corona manual typewriter in the secretary’s office.
While driving past a huge field of skip-row cotton on the brink of harvest near Yazoo City, Mississippi, I can see streaks of color coming from the sunset there on the horizon. I can call up a clear picture of traveling to a large cotton operation in North Louisiana to interview a farmer and being spooked out by the image of a huge bat painted on the water tower in Transylvania.
All these sights and sounds and smells are clear as a bell in my mind’s eye, and, for the love of cotton, I hope it will always be this way.