Day 335
How Linda does all that she manages never ceases to amaze me. Yet, here we are again with another Saturday of stream of consciousness writing at her invitation. This week, we go back to English class and study parts of speech. This time specifically, prepositions. Linda’s prompt this week is:
Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “preposition” Start your post with any preposition. Bonus points if you end with one too. Enjoy!
Over yonder. That phrase has been in my head since yesterday when we drove through the places where my ancestors first settled into the southeastern part of the country.
Over yonder means ‘over there’ I suppose. But yonder to a child usually meant a ‘fer piece’.
I wrote about the Paw Paw Patch song a while back. There is a line in the song that says “way down yonder”.
Yesterday, I realized the people living in the ancestral places of my great-great grandparents still grow tobacco over yonder. I have not seen field of tobacco growing in years.
You may not know that the government at one time subsidized tobacco growers. This was a means of controlling the amount of tobacco grown and the price per pound at the auction after harvest.
Our family never grew tobacco, but it was a cash crop and survival for a lot of small farmers. Growing tobacco is a lot of work. Seeds are set out under ‘hot beds’ covered in cheesecloth in the early spring. Later they would be transplanted, topped and suckered as the season progressed. The tobacco is eventually harvested by cutting the stalks (or leaves in some cases) and moving them to a barn to dry before farmers take them to a tobacco warehouse for the fall auction. Buyers would offer a price based on the quality of the plants.
There were seasons when farmers were paid not to grow in a given year. Or older farmers unable to work the fields were often leasing their allotments to other farmers for a percentage of the harvest.
The government stopped the subsidy in 2004. A lot of farmers withdrew from tobacco farming. It still seems to be thriving in some places. As much as our tobacco use has gone down in the US, there is great demand in developing countries. Which we know means a lot more people will die from this very addictive habit.
It seems consumers of tobacco are not hard to come by.
In need of a Saturday challenge to boost your weekend blogging? I suggest you check out Linda Hill’s blog to read all the rules and take in all the different ways of handling a single prompt.
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