A Trip to Cotton Country

Our latest adventure was a trip to Sikeston, Mo., in the delta country. The area is known for its cotton and rice crops, and for a restaurant whose signs decorate Interstate Highways from Colorado to Texas and beyond.


We and our friend Mike took a drive in Gracie and arrived at Lambert's Cafe (a misnomer, since it's more like a cavern or a warehouse in size) in time for supper. The decor is early American license plate, hardwood benches, and all the "throwed" rolls you can catch. I'm smiling because I actually caught two of them (and dropped none)!

We were actually on a mission to attend the area assembly of our church (hence, my T-Shirt in the photo above.) After a restful night at the local Super 8, we found the First Christian Church easily. It seemed to us, with the red brick and steeple, to have something in common architecturally with Compton Heights.
It was a glorious day--clear, cool and calm.

Contrary to rumor, this is not Norm's harem, but part of the Compton "crew" that attended the assembly, plus our former student associate pastor, who graduated from seminary last spring. Inside, the sanctuary reminded us of Compton, too, from the arrangement of the windows to the kind of wood and finish on the pews. It was a good meeting, and we saw a lot of old friends from many churches.

One unique feature we noted about Sikeston as we were driving around, trying to find the church, was a pair of cotton fields almost in the middle of town on South Main Street. The smoke in the distance in this picture is from agricultural burning, something that irritated a few sets of city lungs.

As I was taking this close-up of the cotton, I kept hearing an old melody from the Sixties run through my head:
When I was a little bitty baby, my mama would rock me in the cradle, in those old, cotton fields back home...Finally, decades later, I actually got to see a cotton field, up close and personal.