IT'S ALL TREW
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October 2004
Delbert Trew
Legends, folklore and songs abound about 'tumbling tumbleweeds.' The Sons of the Pioneer made a good living singing about cool water and tumble-weeds. One song tells the tale of a lonesome settler lady who wrote poems and love letters, then attached them to tumbleweeds rolling by her remote Kansas dugout, hoping that some lonely bachelor would read them. Others told of lonely farm girls who tied colorful ribbons to rolling tumbleweeds, then daydreamed about handsome cowboys finding the offerings and coming back to court them.
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The flat terrain of the Great Plains was transformed into ridges and dunes as tumbleweeds lodged in the barbed wire fences and around farm equipment parked in the fields, which then caught the blowing sands of the Dust Bowl. I never found a tumbleweed affixed with colorful ribbons. Instead, I remember the hot, hard work of taking a pitchfork in hand and digging the tangled masses of tumbleweeds from fencerows for burning.
There are a few things like ravenous grasshoppers and tiresome tumble-weeds that we could've done without. Yet, I guess even the good Lord had to 'piddle around' a little at times.
- Delbert Trew is a freelance writer, retired rancher and supervisor of the Devil's Rope Museum in McLean, Texas. Contact him at Trew Ranch, Box A, Alanreed, TX 79002; (806) 779-3164; e-mail: trewblue@centramedia.net
Everything green - including crops, gardens and grasses -was damaged by plagues of grasshoppers that periodically appeared. They also liked to eat the bark off cedar posts, vehicle seat covers and even chewed holes in the laundry as it hung on the clothesline.
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