Write About..."a mess"...

     "Hey, young'un, git on up yonder on the truck 'fore ya git left behind."
I scrambled up into the bed and settled in with the others; my mom, dad, sister and Aunt Bill.  The rusty old pick-up ground into gear as my Uncle JB let his foot off the clutch and put on a little gas.  We bumped and bounced across the washboard earth that had been furrowed time and again.  I watched the puffs of dust that billowed and swelled behind us as I sat on the tailgate and dangled my legs over the edge.  The flurry of dirt would drift on the air then settle on the leaves of the trees that stood between the fields and the narrow road that led here.  The dusted branches looked ashen against the bright blue sky.  When raindrops would first come, they would splatter into the dust leaving millions of little freckled faces.  But there was no rain today.  And was it hot.  Even the early part of summer brought scorchers in central Florida.  Florida is where I was born.  I stayed until I was 30, and then moved on.

     The truck rolled to a stop and I jumped to the ground.  I threw the scratchy burlap sack over my shoulder and made my way to the far end of the row to start pickin' as I made my way back.  To my reckonin' made a lotta sense 'cause that way the heavier my sack got, the closer I was to the truck.  This ain't your backyard, Martha Stewart, little organic garden patch... my Uncle J played with the big boys and right on top of the Magic Kingdom.  He owned most of that land outside Orlando and was a commercial farmer.   He grew green beans for Del Monte.  Blue Lake green beans; millions of 'em; row after row after hundred mile row.  Yep.  Long before Snow White ever floated down Main Street USA, I squatted there; I sweated there; I suffered heat exhaustion; right there.  Me, a poor little child.

     I considered looking into the labor laws but decided that I liked eating those beans too much so I kept my mouth shut and picked.  There was the proverbial Pollyanna 'glad game' to play; sad side of the coin bein' I had to pick a lotta beans.  The glad part?... bein' glad we were only gleanin' the fields.  After the huge mechanical pickers, after the migrant workers; just us, family, cannin' in the summer so we could be eatin' in the winter.

   Ya know, I couldn't say what folks in other parts of the world do when they have a mess, but where I come from, we EAT it.
     We got fried chicken, biscuits, mashed taters... and a big ole mess o' green beans!