How To Make Dried Flower Arrangements
The tobacco leaves are harvested from the bottom of the plant upwards as they begin to yellow and I guess are vine ripened in this sense. The leaves are picked by hand by mostly Mexican workers and loaded onto small 6 by 8 foot trailers with 4 foot high plywood sides and stacked high and slightly above the top and then pulled behind slow moving pickup trucks down highway 49 in North Carolina, on their way to being graded and weighed at area processing plants. The bigger and bottom-most leaves may be picked in mid summer but the harvest begins in earnest in late August and into September. During this latter period the roads are littered with tobacco leaves and suggest a time gone by unaffected by a hundred years of progress and all things modern.
There is a well maintained family cemetery less than a mile behind the house I have been working on, through thick hardwood forests cut here and there with footpaths opening onto tobacco or corn or soybean fields, ponds with forgotten bass and bream, and the occasional sagging barn and farmhouse, and in the cemetery is the remains of a man who in the mid nineteenth century was an area "Negro speculator," which to my imperfect understanding means he acquired and then resold slaves as a profitable business. He and other landowners in the area are commemorated for their years of hard work and sizable real estate holdings by having most of the area's back roads named after them, and many are also remembered, with surprising detail, by recorded slave narratives. Slaves, some one hundred years old, interviewed in the 1930s and 40s, offer a remarkable insight into a time that for some people is surely looked back to as a "good ole day" and to others is seen as a time of unimaginable horror. The slave narratives are as interesting for their kind memories as they are for the evil retold. There was it seems always a good man or woman doing battle with the bad. Which is not meant as an overly simplified blanket of forgiveness for badness but just to suggest that there have always been people willing to stand up and fight the good fight. And that nothing is hopeless.
Not without my good friend Doubt but feeling ok, perhaps even full of myself, pulling away from the end of the dead end road and the property almost entirely detail-cleaned of it's momentous yard garbage--garbage spread and in some cases buried over one-third of the two and a half acres, and taking in the house prepped and scraped and primed and double-coated with fresh paint, inside and out, and even allowing for its persistent appearance of lower, working-class dowdiness, which cannot be cured with paint or new roof or new central air and heating system, or refinished wood floors, new linoleum, new second hand appliances, some repaired plumbing and electric, the new coat of varnish on kitchen cabinets or even the new shelving paper on every cabinet shelf and in every drawer, I am still driving away with a sense of pride, which has been long in coming and is a pretty fair distance away from the palpable shame and I dare-say horror I experienced pulling up to the property two years ago, after ignoring it for every bit of fifteen years.
Knowing that this is but my penultimate exit, that I will be back for a final go over, I turn left from gravel onto the paved highway 49, away from that family cemetery behind me, and I begin passing tobacco fields with large clusters of Mexican workers. I wave to them and see them in my rear view mirror turning to see who it was waving and perhaps wondering could I be the better employer (or who knows, employee) sometime down the road. The heat had broken a few days previous and the red dirt and green/yellowing tobacco and blue sky is not mired by the haze of superheated wet air and the view is crisp and clean. I look at a variety of weeds growing on both sides of the road and see possible dried flower arrangements.
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