WEED

Fortunately for a lot of people the High Sheriff was born before his time.  A few years after he was term limited out, vans painted psychedelic colors were spotted parked along rural roads in Bindweed County.  They were sporting Illinois plates and Chicago bumper stickers.  Long haired young people in tie died shirts and headbands sporting peace signs were seen picking weeds from roadside ditches and loading them into the back of the van.  The times, they were a changin’.

Early in World War II the Japanese captured the Philippine islands cutting off the major supply of Manila rope to the United States.  Rope, made from hemp, was needed for almost everything used to fight a war.  So, for the war effort, the government ironically urged farmers to grow hemp -- marijuana which had been made illegal only four years before.  In part due to a ridiculous propaganda movie Reefer Madness which later became a cult classic.

Well, we won the war, as much as you can win any war, and the patriotic farmers of Indiana went back to growing corn and soybeans, plowing under

their forgotten fields of marijuana.  Some of it remained along fence rows and in forgotten corners where it multiplied and thrived regarded as ditchweed and not as a cash crop.

It was not until many years later when I became more conversant with different forms of weed and the effects of smoke that I remembered and recognized the pungent unmistakable odor of our haymow in the barn on our farm in Soythistle Township in Bindweed County Indiana.

 THE SHADOW SAYS: BORDEN WASN’T THE ONLY ONE WHO HAD CONTENTED COWS.