by John Ragsdale Jr.

The little boy shrugged into his hand-me-down coat and pulled on his older brother’s too-large rubber boots.  He then went outside, into the biting December wind.  He bent over and picked up two sticks from beneath the oak in the front yard, and removed the broken Barlow knife from his pocket where he began whittling at the ends.  Satisfied, he took an empty Prince Albert can from his overalls and broke the lid off while walking to the shed, next to the outhouse.  In the shed, he found the hammer and tapped a roofing nail through the can, into the first stick.  Next, he attached a short piece of twine, running it to the opposite end of the stick.  With another roofing nail, he tacked the lid from the can to the end of the second stick.  He placed the hammer back where he found it, before leaving the shed and stepping back into the cold.

He walked to the edge of the road and sat down.  There, he maneuvered his homemade road grader to smooth out the roughness of the driveway.  Once he had a pile of dirt and gravel, he operated his backhoe to move it to the side.  He spent an hour working before deciding to take a break.  He parked his equipment and stood up, stretching the kinks out of his back.  He walked into the road, and looked both ways at nothing, before he removed an orange from his pocket and peeled it.  Each slice of orange was savored, as if it were the first orange he had tasted.  Being the little boy he was, the juice from the orange caked around his nose, on his upper lip, and dripped from the point of his chin.  Christmas had come once again to the Delta, and to the boy, life was as delicious as the orange – for you learn to be satisfied with very little when you are a sharecropper’s child.