growing up

I grew up in the 50's and 60's.  My hometown was in the deep south with a population in the 2,000's.  I did not grow up on a farm although our geographical region was decidedly an agri-based economy.  As soon as I was old enough I began to mow yards in the summer and work in a grocery store during the school year.  When I was 15, my father conveniently got me a summer job on a large 2,000 acre cotton, soybean, and rice farm.  I worked this job each summer until high school graduation.  I spent spare time playing sports, hunting, and fishing.  I jokingly say that I was raised with a shotgun in one hand and a fishing pole in the other.  We lived in an area blessed with abundant fishing and hunting resources.

The time I spent with my father growing up was mostly hunting, fishing, and just hanging out with him.  He managed a large bulk fuel storage facility for Esso / Exxon.  He bought me a hunting / fishing / farm truck when I was 15 (to my mother's objections!).  I have such fond memories of those experiences.

In addition to hunting and fishing, my father's greatest passion was growing a huge vegetable garden every year.  When I say "huge", I mean that literally.  His garden plot was located on the grounds of an old cotton gin and the soil was rich enough to grow anything (I just heard an advertisement asking how you grow pork rinds?  You plant bacon bits and harvest them when they sprout rinds!).  I think my father could have grown pork rinds from planting bacon bits.  His total garden size was about 1/2 acre.  He raised every vegetable in abundance, with a focus on tomatoes, beans, corn, and melons.  I remember one morning he went to the garden and brought home 10 tomatoes he had just harvested.  When he weighed them they weighed 10 lbs, an average of 1 lb each!  We had two LARGE chest freezers on the back of our house.  One for wild game and fish, and the other for vegetables.  My mother also canned vegetables and made pickles.  In addition, we always went to the orchard and harvested peaches and apples, and also picked wild dewberries.  We had friends who had an animal farm and my mother purchased farm eggs, butter, and bacon from them.   My mother cooked a full breakfast and lunch every day.  We always had leftovers for supper.  Mostly twice a week we had a wild game meal and usually on Saturdays we had a fish fry, usually with the catch of that day.  When my parents died, those chest freezers were still packed with food!  They never forgot living through the depression years in the 1920's and 30's and never intended to go hungry.

Back to my father's garden.  Obviously, with a garden that large and successful, there was no way we could consume or store all the food it yielded.  I used to laugh that my father fed half our town with vegetables!  Seriously, he had certain widows and poor people he regularly showered with garden veggies.  He got more joy giving stuff away than he did enjoyment from eating it!!

There is at least one liability from growing up in that environment.  The use of pesticides and chemicals in farming was rampant during those years, including chemicals containing DDT and other harmful agents.  When I worked on the large soybean farm during high school I regularly manned the chemical truck and mixed large batches of application used by our farm equipment to spray the crops.  I also "flagged" for crop dusters who used powerful biplanes to fly over our fields and disperse the chemicals.  "Flagging" meant that I would hold a large flag in the air for the pilot to use to line up his flight over the field, usually at an altitude of just a few feet above the plants.  I can remember on one occasion I had to literally dive to the ground to get out of the way of the low-flying plane.  When one "flagged" for a crop duster, it meant you got both covered by the chemical and breathed it in.  10 years ago when my oldest sister struggled with the disease lymphoma, the doctors quizzed her about where she grew up.  When she told them she grew up in a small southern crop-farming town, they said the farming chemicals contributed greatly to causing the lymphoma.   Also, as a boy playing organized summer league baseball, I endured many pre-game exposures to pesticides to control mosquitoes (It was impossible to stay outside in the summer without mosquito repellent).  Again, these chemicals were dispersed by crop-duster planes over our playing field, many times while we were warming up for the game.  To this day, I can remember the smell!

I treasure my childhood and teen years in that small-town environment.  Maybe a future post will review the values and life-skills I learned from this wonderful upbringing.  Maybe my GERD was heightened by some of the above circumstances.  Yet, I don't think I would change anything!