I love rural America, and appreciate the hard work required to operate a farm or orchard.
It is "unnatural", I believe, to be divorced entirely from the rhythms of raising crops, and the cycles of seedtime and harvest.
Each year at Thanksgiving, I give thanks that I have memories of seeing the wheat being threshed, the corn stalks shocked in the fields, and the baled hay stacked high in the barn.
Nevertheless, remote areas of the country do sustain some wierd outcasts who are barely connected to the larger culture. These can be folks be scary.
* * * * * * * *
I have a postcard, circa 1910, with the picture of a bearded man behind a wheelbarrow in which two insipid-looking girls are seated. The figures are in the foreground of a peach orchard.
The legend on the postcard reads, "Peaches, the kind we raise".
I think the old man is meant to look friendly and down-to-earth, and the girls are meant to look shy, yet alluring.
But, the picture gives me the creeps.
*

*


Comments: 25
Or, just a major tranquilizer?
I too live in rural America the only difference is we raise corn and soybeans not peaches.
Then we agree on both points, Lori!
I suspect the bodies are buried in the orchard, Ron.
These trees look well-fertilized.
Horrors, Beaker.
I had a relationship in which the in-laws were a problem, but they were nothing like these yokels.
Is it just appalachian stereotyping that bings this to mind?
That is true, Beaker. It looks much worse when you are pushing your offspring around in a wheelbarrow.
Those eyes...did the artist really mean to make them look that way? There's no chance of damage to the card making that guy's eyes so asymmetric, is there?
The upper left hand corner had been nibbled away by insects or a mouse - from the top of the trees to the letter "Pe" in peach.
You can see that my reconstruction of the "P" and the "e" is not exactly like the other letters.
There was also a big brown smudge on the forehead of the bearded guy, but the eyes are those that the artist made.