GOOD MORNING, FRIENDS

A Rememberamble for October 01, 2025

It is officially October, not only is it now suddenly October, but just as suddenly, it is no longer September, and believe it or not, October 1st just happens to fall on the very first day of the month. That makes it so easy to keep track of it all. I wish everything in life was so simple. Farmers are going to be plowing up their peanut crops soon, and you know that means BOILED PEANUT TIME! Like most rural Georgians, I do love boiled peanuts.

I like the traditional way of boiling them with salt only, but many like to add hot pepper, fatback, and other adulterants. I do not condone theft, at all, but we did it when we were young, and it was so common that it felt like a harmless game, to steal peanuts to boil, and steal a watermelon from folks' watermelon patch to enjoy the next day. When I was young boy, one year daddy had a big watermelon patch planted in the field beside the highway.

It is best or was back then, to plant a melon patch far from the road, so at least the watermelon poachers would have to walk and work for it a bit. One of daddy's sisters and her family lived just up the road from us, if you walked out to the highway, you could see their house in distance. His nephew raided the melon patch, daddy would give them as many as they wanted, but it was fun sport to take them at night.

Later, daddy raised hell with him about it, he denied taking any, but the next night "someone" came and carved airplanes in some of biggest melons. That crime was never officially solved, but yeah, uh, you know. There is a modern day urban...nah, let's name them rural legends, because that is where most of the best ones are born, that pertains to misappropriating peanuts. It is told on a variety of "good ole boys," who are out riding around on a Friday or Saturday night, drinking, carousing.

Since peanuts are ripe and ready, they decide to stop along a dirt road at a farmer's peanut field to purloin a pickup bed-load. The plan is to go home, sleep it off and then get out under the morning shade to pull the peanuts off and have them to boil. You do know that peanuts grow underground attached to the roots, don't you? Lie and say you do, even if you don't. When they get out there in the morning, they find that they were evidently drunker than they thought.

They did not have peanuts to pick off, as they had stolen and pulled up SOYBEANS!! I know, I know, this happened to your uncle, okay, we gotcha, and it actually happened, right? I will share a peanut stealing tale with you, that I have not told before, but the statute on limitations has long made the illegality of it, a moot point. We did this, and yes, it was funny long after, but a good man who was a hardworking farmer, of course saw no humor in it.

Please don't scold me for telling this, it was fifty years ago. I have mentioned before about our neighbors running the drive-in theater, and I was almost always there. After the show was over late at night, and we cleaned up and were done, some of us would take the carhops home, these were teenage boys that worked for a percentage of their orders and they got their tips. It was peanut season, and back then, farmers hauled their peanuts to the market in those old 1950s and 1960s gas burner trucks.

They had wooden side-bodies and back, with a small sliding door that would slide up so the corn, soybeans, peanuts, grain or whatever could be unloaded over a pit with an auger to relay it to the storage bins. Now, peanuts are generally brought to market with tractor trailers, but then, a big crop took scores or hundreds of small trucks to deliver to the market. They came in such overwhelming numbers, they could not be unloaded as they arrived.

The farmers would leave them, and they were parked all over that area of town by the old fairgrounds and Forestry Unit. They were lined on the shoulders of every side street nearby. The peanut place hired seasonal workers and they ran twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week to handle the influx. The trucks would be picked up by the workers and driven roughly in the order they had come, some a day or two before, and drove them over the pit to unload them.

The load was weighed, unloaded, graded and the farmer got paperwork for his loads. They were unloaded over a pit and a cable lift was placed under the front tires and operators raised them up, and the nuts poured out from the small sliding "grain door' in the tailgate. It was bumped up and open far enough to let them unload and not overrun the pit and the auger. When empty, it was driven away and the next one followed.

Well, when peanut season rolled around, when T---- B------ Jr. and I took the carhops home we would go up the dark side streets that were lined with those old trucks filled with nuts, we would stop, give the carhops a couple of big cardboard boxes or Piggle Wiggly bags. We would make them run over to the nearest truck, place the bags and boxes on the ground beneath the grain door, bump it open a bit and fill the bags/boxes with peanuts, close the door, run back, jump in the car, so we could make our escape.

Well, one night we stopped, gave the boy a box, he ran to a truck, bumped the door up a bit, he opened it too far and it got stuck. Those peanuts looked to us like Niagara Falls! We yelled for him to close it, but he couldn't, and peanuts were running everywhere, so we yelled for him to come on, and we broke camp as they say, we felt like the James Gang after a bank heist, sure the law was on our tail. That whole load of peanuts ran out, onto the ground.

They got most of them up off the ground and salvaged them. We heard that the farmer whose peanuts they were, did not call the law, but said he was going to find out who did it and shoot them. It took us boys a solid week for our nerves to settle and feel safe from going to the chain-gang. Well, we going a bit long here, so I will wrap it up, but first I need to rant about something. What do they use on new towels to make them waterproof?

You know drying off after a shower is a tribulation to me, and to compound it, try using a new towel. You will be wetter after you use the new towel than when you stepped form the shower. Those of you poor misguided souls who pretend to love camping in the wilderness, do not need an expensive and cumbersome tent. Just go to the dollar store, and buy some towels, throw them over a limb, and unless a family of polie bears consumes you during the night, you will be fine.

A tropical storm could not prevail upon a new towel and get it wet. Okay, we love having you visit, come back tomorrow. Same "bat time, same bat station."

NUMBERS 6: 24-26 KJV

we boyz three, babee conway, lil merle, & me