A honey bun and a carton of milk

As a kid, this was an interesting time of the year. Yes, I was glad school was out, but there was something else on the horizon that I dreaded even more than school. There was always something to do on the farm, and in just a few weeks, it would be time to start barning tobacco. And it would be hot, sticky, long hours of hard work. To use a Facebook shortcut, IYKYK (If you know, you know.) But there were a few good memories of those days working in tobacco. As we approach Father’s Day, one memory brings a smile.

I was around 10 or 11 years old, and had moved on from helping at the barn to driving the tractor in the field. In a couple of years, I would be cropping tobacco in the field, and then working in tobacco would really become hard. But for now, I was driving the tractor in the field while the croppers loaded the trailers with the harvested crop. After the trailers were full, I would drive to the tobacco barn, where the hands there would string the tobacco and prepare it to be hung in the barn. Then I would head back to the field with a couple of empty trailers to fill again.

I would drive an old Farmall Super A tractor with two trailers behind it. There would be another tractor with trailers, as we rotated getting the harvested crop out of the field. The process would continue until we got through the field. The days were long and hot, but were not nearly as bad as it was for the croppers. When I first started driving the tractor, I was so small that it was hard for my feet to reach the clutch to make it stop. Daddy would only let me drive in the field, and someone else would drive the tractor with the tobacco to the barn.

But that was a couple of years earlier. Now I was going back and forth from the fields with trailers full of tobacco as we trudged through the tobacco season. (And on rainy days, it really was trudging. A stuck tractor in a tobacco field is no fun.) But that going back and forth between the field and the barn is where there is a memory I am recalling this Father’s Day weekend.

Harvesting tobacco back then was difficult. It was very labor intensive, it took a bunch of folks to get the tobacco in the barn for curing. It was a stressful time for everybody, especially my father. He was often not in a good mood on those tobacco barning days, and now I understand why. It was our livelihood, there was lots to do, and, some of the time, we didn’t have the best of help. (But you got who you could get.)

There would be days when he would chew me out for something which, of course, was totally undeserved. And sometimes I would head the other way if I would see him coming. But I was his son.

On tobacco barning days, Daddy would spend his time mainly going back and forth between the field and the barn, making sure everything was going okay. Early one morning I met him as I was heading to the barn with a load of tobacco. He stopped his truck, got out and handed me a honey bun and a carton of milk. He said, “Go ahead and eat it before you get to the barn.” He didn’t want the rest of the hands to see. During those days, while barning tobacco, there were a couple more times Daddy would sneak me a honey bun and a carton of milk.

We would always stop for mid-morning break while barning for a Coke and a Lance cracker. Those were good, but they couldn’t beat that honey bun. And the feeling that I wasn’t just one of the hands, I was his son, and he was looking after me. (Yes, there’s a Bible parallel there, but I’ll let you look it up. Hint: Galatians 4:7)

There are many other memories of L.F. McPhail through the years that I could share. But for now, there’s a Little Debbie honey bun in the kitchen cabinet and a glass of milk calling me.