Lots of small rock today
I realized today when I was talking to a friend, that not everyone understands what picking rock really means. He called this morning because he was wondering what we were doing today. His family was invited to a wedding close to where we live and wanted to know if we were invited. I told him that we weren’t invited and our plans for the day was to pick rock. He has two daughters (10 & 7) and said that they saw people out walking in the fields the other day and wanted to know what they were doing. I thought about this a lot when we were picking today. When we grew up everyone picked rock. You never got paid for it and it seemed to last for months and months. The reality was that it probably only lasted a couple of weeks, but those were hard weeks when you were kids. You picked rocks after the morning chores and before the cows were milked at night. Mom always let us turn the radio on loud and usually no one ever got hurt bad. Sometimes a rock would get thrown at the wagon and miss. And for some reason one of your brothers or sisters were there to take one for the team. But no one that I ever remember went to the hospital. So I’m thinking about how some kids never will get a chance to experience the last load of the season and how fantastic that felt! And that picking rock was as natural as a routine in our area as going to church on Sunday is to a Catholic. You didn’t question it – you just did it. When I try to explain to our friends who don’t live around here, they just can’t understand why you would ride out in the field on a wagon, get really dirty, and pick rocks for hours. Then dump the wagon of rocks in some ravine and start all over again. I was trying to figure out why this is so hard for others to grasp but then I started to think of those people on TV that hunt alligators. They get up in the morning, ride their boat into the swamp and spend all day looking for alligators. That to me seems hard to understand why you would do that. It’s really a different way to spend each day but at the end of the last show that I saw, one of the hunters said that he had the best job in the world. He said that he is able to get up everyday and spend it doing something that he loves. Not I’m not saying that anyone would ever LOVE picking rock. Because if you do-you may need to get some professional help. But I do think that it is a choice. You do it because it’s needed in the long run to keep your farm in financial security. You can’t afford to have your machinery break because it hit rocks when you are combining corn or beans. You also do it because you get out in the fresh air and there are no other distractions from what you have to deal with day to day. So really there isn’t much difference between the alligator hunters looking for those gator eyes in the water or the farm kids looking for the rocks that are just peaking up in the bean rows. Who would have thought?
