A handful each way

Here is a neat story by writer Sue Monk Kidd:

Many of my childhood memories come from times I spent on my grandfather's farm in Georgia. I especially recall the day he gave in to my begging and let me pick cotton. I was seven, and the burlap sack I was given to collect cotton in was bigger than I was.

The cotton field stretched endlessly ahead of me freckled with white and drenched with heat. The pickers were paid by the pound, and their hands moved swiftly. They skinned the bushes of their fluffy white balls leaving me far behind. I wanted to quit. Frustrated and tearful, I looked back for my grandfather's truck and realized he was gone, having left me in the care of the field workers. Noticing my distress, a black woman idled over, her hair tied in a faded red bandana. "Mind if I pick with you?" she asked.

"No ma'am," I said. "I don't guess so."

Her fingers worked like music along the row, and every time she dropped a handful of cotton in her sack, she dropped one in mine too. "One for you and one for me," she said.

My bag grew plump. When we took a break in the plum tree shade at the fence, I asked her why she was putting cotton in my sack.

She laughed. "For every handful you take in life, that means you've got to give," she said.

Later she would come to work in my grandmother's house, where I would hear her repeat this incantation many times. There is brilliance in it. Imagine a world with a handful of giving for every handful of taking.