I. Twin Days
ONE SPRING day in the 1930s my great-grandfather Will approached his neighbor, a fellow cotton farmer named Horace, to tell him some news about the sky. He and Horace had some sort of land-sharing arrangement worked out, the details of which I don't know except that it ended badly when my great-grandfather slept with Horace's wife. But that's a different story for a different day.
On this day, Will and Horace were still friends and neighbors toiling side by side, their backs bent under a mercurial sky. Will had been studying his almanac and told Horace that the moon would pass through Gemini on the following two days, Gemini being the ideal sign for planting cotton. This phenomenon was known as twin days. Hey Horace, can you mark the rows you plant on those days? Will asked.
Sure, said Horace, why not? It was their own little science experiment. Cotton farmers lived in a fragile balance. “But there has been too much skepticism of the power of the moon. Aristotle and the Farmers were nearer right than the skeptics.” Despite their hardscrabble values, cotton farmers were, as we might say in modern parlance, a little .
