Wonderful piece. It takes me back to the smell of curing tobacco. My grandfather raised tobacco, and from the time we could do something useful in the fields, about the same time we could ride a bike over the half mile of gravel roads or down the trail through the woods, we went on those hazy, almost damp and still cool mornings out to the fields where we hoed away the weeds and squashed the tobacco worms, ever mindful to not damage the plants, even as we absorbed the tobacco resins through our skin.
We learned to watch for the signs of mosaic virus, the spots on the leaves that could destroy a crop. And, as we grew older, our responsibilities changed.
We dropped sticks, the sticks the plant was speared on to be hung in the barns to cure in the humid air of the Maryland tidewater. We learned to spear the tobacco plants on those sticks, to carefully load those sticks, now laden with tobacco plants onto the cart that would take them to be suspended between the tier poles we, too used as jungle gyms until the harvest, and then, driving tractors and climbing into the lofty heights of the barns and hanging the tobacco, from the chicken rafters down, to cure.
Those barns are long gone now, all save one that was rebuilt as an historical edifice. Most tobacco growers accepted the settlement and terms, took the payout to never again grow the crop after the 'Big Tobacco' lawsuits against the industry.
Most of our tobacco was not bound for cigars, but for cigarettes. Bright leaf and dark, blended where they were subjected to the processes that made cigarettes. But before that, as the plants were removed from the barn, the sticks extracted and piled for next year's crop, the gentle rain of tiny fragments of tobacco leaves sifted down to cover the floor in "barn trash", which I later sifted for the best bits to roll my own cigarettes.
I never got good at rolling, even in my bad old days, and often deferred to others in different venues, but those cigarettes were my own, and made many a nicotine fit flee.
Those plants were stripped down, one leaf at a time, by grade. Ground leaves, bright leaf, dark leaf, and tips, the latter the most heavily resinous leaves on the plant that were used to make chewing tobacco--far too strong for cigarettes, where the bright leaf and dark were destined, to be blended to control flavor and potency, and get the right burn characteristics for cigarettes, something I can see cigar rollers doing as well with the leaves that made their craft.
I learned much there. How to work, bent over, cutting three rows of plants and gently, yet quickly laying them down behind me so I could advance to the next ones, leaving a row for those spearing the plants onto the sticks behind me.
Sweat was an ally, even in the cloying humidity between the 1/4 mile wide creek, the woods, and the two mile wide river beyond, it cooled the body, and water quickly became my favorite drink. I'd wear a sweatshirt in the heat, and a wide brimmed hat that bore little resemblance to the state trooper's hat it had been in it's earlier life, with holes slashed in the crown to let air through.
That hat was destined to become my 'field hat' as I learned geology, it's brim sewed back onto the crown by the same girlfriend who thought it funny to pull it down so hard the two separated. I don't know what became of it. It made it to North Dakota with me and got lost in the shuffle, perhaps one way for God to tell me I'd chosen a different life, far away from my roots.
I once grew tobacco here in North Dakota. The plants reached six feet in height, not counting the stalk of flowers at the top. I topped them out, but barely a week had passed when there was a killing frost, and rather than let them be killed thus, I cut them and hung them in the basement where they cured. One whiff would take me back to my grandfather's farm, the barns, the field hands chattering as they harvested, and eventually, stripped the crop down and bundled the cured leaves for market.
It was an instant from my past, a reminder of where and how I'd learned to work, and that all labor well done is worthy of respect, and the grandfather who fostered those lessons long ago.
It is a pity the crop is no longer grown there. Other crops have taken over the fields for most, crops which are planted and harvested predominantly by machines, with few people needed to do either instead of the small army of relatives and hired hands who brought in the tobacco crops. So few learn that sort of work, and that's a shame, not because it is a career goal for the field hand, but the lesson that hard work done well is is a good thing now denied to many who could use it in a different age.
The last tobacco farmers in Southern Maryland now are mostly Mennonites, people who have no qualms about working hard, and whom I respect in that regard.
I grew up in a different world. One that has mostly passed, like the blessed coolness of a cloud crossing the sun on those steamy days in the field.
Now I live two thousand miles away, surrounded by people who make their living off the land or the richness beneath it. People much like those I grew up around. My father and grandfather are gone, both having lived rich and full lives, who taught me lessons that cannot be found in a book but have served me well my whole life, for which I owe eternal thanks.
Thank you for letting me pollute your reminiscences with my own. Different stories, but much the same in some ways, tied together by that leaf, one which I can almost smell as I type this, so much different from the processed leaves many only know when they think of tobacco.
A place, a time, both now far away.
