In last week’s Watercolor: Texas class we focused on Texas cotton plants, first, with an up-close of a few ripe bolls and then a broader view of the field ripe for harvest, or almost. The cotton fields of the lower Rio Grande Valley produce a particular warmth, and swelling of pride in the little plants. Having lived down in the deepest part of the Valley for more than a year now, I can attest to the expectancy that the cotton season brings. As the plants slowly grow from random green bushy plant to identifiable cotton plants you can’t help but feel like there is possibility in the air. I mean, it’s cotton! It will be transformed from prickly puffball to something you want to use to apply your favorite moisturizer, or into squishy towels or bolts of fabric to make garments. But, before then, before our eyes, on treks between the border and the horse stable we watch it blossom. And, in the heat it somehow defies what the dashboard temperature gauge, and our skin and our squinting eyes tell us. The cotton practically dares the sun, go on, give me all you can, you can’t make it too hot or dry for me! And then, the cotton does a really amazing thing. It’s branches and leaves brown and crisp under the scorching heat, and the cotton bolls themselves fluff up and out, pushing out from their thorny armor tendrils. And the fields in which the cotton grows are transformed too. They stiffen and brown and look like a place you’d not want to walk through, even if the weather were fine. Which it’s not. At the height of cotton, temperatures are easily over 100 every day, for months on end. With little rain. Even at dusk, you’ll be shocked to see the temperature has cooled to a mere 97 and it feels like a breath of heaven, and when a breeze catches through the field, it is heavenly. And then there is a race— who will be first to bring in the harvest of cotton? Turns out, it’s Texas most years, and from our trips in and out of the Valley, I can tell you the closer the cotton grows to the Rio Grande, the sooner it’s harvested. There’s another race happening, against the rain. The trick as best I can tell is to let the cotton get as big and fluffy and stay nestled in its boll for as many of the hot days as possible, then, get it out and harvested into giant, like bigger, way bigger, than hay bale bigger, bales. It’s the most reliable snow of the year- the cotton crumbs floating across highway, and piled along the median.
Because I am south of the Valley, living in sight of the tented groups of people waiting through the seasons to gain entry to the land of opportunity, I can’t help but wonder. Just how resilient does one have to be to make it through the summer, under the blistering sun, living in plain sight, yet somehow still invisible?
