Every summer we harvest ‘taters; ok its potatoes but I like to say taters so there. Uncle Muddy digs up potatoes in the garden with the tractor. All of us get buckets and walk down the rows picking them up. When our buckets get full, we dump them in the back of his pickup and we have to lay them out in the side part of the hay barn.

We call this the milk barn, and what we have to do is lay the potatoes right on the concrete floor. We sprinkle these with lime to stop them from rotting, but the hard part is this: we have to make sure the potatoes are laid out just so with none of them touching. This has to be done by hand, and I always get to do it because I like it, and I can do it faster than everybody else.

If these potatoes touch, any one of them, it will make the one next to it rot faster, so you can’t skip this step. It needs to be just so, with the windows in the milk barn blacked out, so its cool and damp. Every so often, we go back out with that lime and put a little more on there. Not too much or too many times, but if you do it just right your potatoes will last a long time without rotting. Then you can keep them fresh, eat them outright after cooking, or sell them wherever.

Today while making the potatoes not touch, it occurred to me: that’s probably what is wrong with city people. They touch too much. They are packed in too many in one place, and they touch and start to rot. They don’t get to go out in fresh air in the woods by themselves and just think.

They don’t have any space between them; its all crowded stores, crowded workplaces, crowded traffic and crowded sidewalks. No wonder they seem so worn out and irritated. They touching and don’t have room to breathe! I am glad that I don’t have to live like that for sure.