James Pavlovsky

The Last Cotton Kids James Pavlovsky

Growing up in rural central Texas from the early 1960's to 1970, this book is a series of short stories that takes two young children through adventure after adventure so they can craft their skills in the art of nature exploration and self-reliance. As you read through the different stories, you realize it is not the things your parents told you that helped carve your personality, but it is those things they silently allowed you to do that had the greatest impact. Let each of my stories guide you through a time when living on a farm was far less about not having a color TV, video games, a phone or any air conditioning to comfort oneself and more about enjoying time spent outside in nature. The chapter "Limestone County BC" is set in the early 1960's black land farming area where my brother David and I began developing our early curiosity of the outdoors. We lived in a house where fresh well water, outdoor toilets, chickens, cows and our beloved dog BoBo were the centerpiece of everything we knew. The chapter "Cotton Gins" delivers our first experience away from home and introduces us to the slow paced city of Mart Texas and the cotton gin. It is here that we first experience the existence of life beyond our own farm. The chapter "Living on the Hill" is broken up into two short stories and focuses on mischief and the art of running away from home. The chapter "Great Aunts and Uncles" is where we develop our first experience of a time and of people who would ultimately disappear from our lives at an early age. The home cooked meals prepared from fresh farm ingredients and the lost time of houses without electricity and running water made us appreciate what we had. The chapter "Days with Dad" is like the farm version of "taking the kids to work day", but with a twist. While many days began with hard work, they always ended with the celebration of a good day of learning nature, Dad's favorite eating places, beer joints and local Mart estab