REMNANTS OF COTTON
It’s no longer over but…and I’m already feeling the finality.
I’m riding south from Lubbock, Texas. This can be a pressure I can most probably no longer be making many extra instances.
Amidst a mud hurricane…I dropped my eldest daughter off right here on the college a few years in the past.
I hugged her good-bye and left her at the back of to hunt her long run.
At the darkish pressure house that fateful night time…way back…my throat was once constricted so tight that I didn’t utter a phrase for hours.
It isn’t that I didn’t need to…I simply couldn’t.
With the point of view of time…issues modified. I grew to recognize this far off position and this new time of lifestyles.
Now, a decade later…my youngest is attending that very same college and my spouse and I are making the 5-hour commute again house after a short lived and penultimate consult with.
We can be again yet one more time in December to observe him graduate after which…it’s over.
I’ve by no means lived right here…on this southern finish of the Panhandle referred to as the “Llano Estacado”. Alternatively, I’ve been right here sufficient to comprehend its stark and unpretentious attractiveness.
Huge expanses of windswept, endless vistas moderately appointed with ranch houses, nodding donkeys and weathered rock…
and right here close to Lubbock…fields of cotton.
Defying the robust north winds, the stays of the cotton crop grasp to their brittle branches this past due November.
The harvest is all however entire. Left at the back of…are simplest frayed white residuals of a few Texas farmer’s livelihood.
The bolls have burst…however no longer the entire resultant cotton fragments have met their future.
Or…have they?
I’m positive for some it is only leftover cotton that can blow away or crumble into the earth under…
no longer for me.
Like the common-or-garden deficient, from days long past through…I’m gleaning the entire sustenance I want from those spent fields.
They completely replicate my emotions…my twilight ideas…as I get ready to mention good-bye to some other level in my lifestyles.
A level of lifestyles that noticed my kids take a look at their independence and develop into adults.
I neither concern, nor embody this trade.
On this position the place the land by no means ends and eternity can also be observed in each and every path…I make my peace with the quickly to be previous.
I have no idea what number of chapters stay within the tale of my earthly lifestyles.
Alternatively, riding out right here at the fringe of the sector…what I know…is this most up-to-date bankruptcy can be full of the ideas of my kids that experience made this adventure out west …and for a time…a lifestyles.
Their just right instances, their trials and their exhausting fought achievements…tied to this magnificent land with recollections…without end bookmarked…
through remnants of cotton.
From Corridor (1.15) Acres…
Midlothian, Texas…
Please have a just right day!
Greg T. Corridor
