I was fourteen years old that summer. My best friends and I were always broke, so when my father offered to pay us $15 a day to hoe his beans, we were ecstatic. Wow! That was a fortune to us, back in 1972. We had already figured how many new shirts, how many pairs of platform shoes, and how many trips to McDonald's our earnings over the course of several days might afford us. We thought we were pretty tough, and we knew a lot of farm girls at school who spent their whole summers doing this kind of work, so we figured, how hard could it be? The three of us excitedly took Dad up on his offer.

Although my family always lived in town, my father owned a farm way out in the country, where he grew cotton, some corn, and vegetables. Being the daughter of a "city lady," I had never been asked or required to do farm chores. My mother and my maternal grandmother were grooming me for much different possibilities, and I had only a nodding acquaintance with the workings of the farm. Mom wasn't crazy about the idea of my performing manual labor, but with the help of Dad and my buddies, we finally talked her into it.

Polly, Liz, and I loaded up into my dad's old gold cadillac early that Monday morning, ready to work and even more ready to earn some dough. I remember that driving through town on the way to the farm, we ducked down in the seats as low as possible to avoid being seen in the old klunker. Our social standing at junior high would definitely plunge if our classmates saw us in such a deplorable ride. Dad had carefully explained the job to us the afternoon before, with many "hands-on" demonstrations with a hoe. We had our sack lunches in tow, along with a huge thermos of koolade and another very important article - toilet paper. Thinking this would be an excellent opportunity to work on our tans, we all wore our shortest shorts and our bikini tops, our hair up in high ponytails. We waved goodbye to Dad as he left us to do our hoeing.

We approached the field of beans, implements thrown casually over our young shoulders, scoping out the site. Spread before us lay rows and rows of beans, seemingly endless. I admit, I was a little intimidated by the sheer number, but then I again thought of girls we knew who did this kind of stuff all the time.

"My Lord, Tam! What does your daddy DO with all these beans? Do y'all own Green Giant, or something?" asked Polly.

"I dunno, really. I guess he sells them. Hey, look at it this way. It'll take us a LONG time to get

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