Honey and I drove 14 hours to rural southeast Georgia to visit my sister Col. Peggy and brother-in-law Gen. Doc at the new house Doc had built on his 600-acre ancestral family farm.
He lured me down there for the first half of Thanksgiving week with a promise that I could have as many pecan nuts as I could pick up, free of charge and shell-cracked to boot. I am a sucker for pecans.
Pecans (they say PEE- cans) are big business in this part of Georgia, along with cotton, peanuts and watermelons. We found the new house located inside a big pecan orchard, right next to a newly picked cotton field and another that was in watermelons this summer. A field of peanuts was just up the red dirt road that we drove in on.
The region’s culture is rural and Southern, with life revolving around farms, families, dogs, hunting and fishing, but these are not the poor sharecropper farms of yore. Doc’s leased field next door had just been picked with a new million-dollar cotton harvester, which left 500-pound white round bales of cotton, 15 of them, on the field. They were to be quickly picked up by semi-trucks because they’re worth about $2,000 apiece. Each farm field is 50 acres or so, and has its own water well and electric to service a long, wheeled irrigation frame, called a “pivot” because it pivots around the well.
It is illegal to plant cotton unless you are licensed by the state, a control measure which allowed Georgia to declare itself boll weevil-free only about 30 years ago.
Doc’s...
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