I have never believed in ghosts, but since my encounter with an angel in my hospital room earlier in the year, the possibility that apparitions may actually exist is something that I must pursue.

I knew something was weird when I walked to my vegetable garden in the early morning sun, before it rose higher in the sky and began baking everything, including me, under its rays.

Looking over at the huge wheat field that was about thirty feet from my garden, I saw that its deep green coloring was just beginning to turn golden.   I saw where the winds from the storm of the night before had left swirls in the grain as if a helicopter had circled just above the tops of the plants.

The grass was damp from the rain and the soil was muddy in the lower end of the garden as I realized that the grass that was trying to suffocate the purple hull peas was gone.  The earth around the three upper rows had been hoed recently, that morning, as evidence by the dirt gently piled against the base of the plants.

At first I thought that my friend who had the garden plot next to me had done this for me, though it had been a lot of work. Looking closer, I realized that strange feeling I had was justified.  There were no footprints in the damp soil left by the person that had weeded the peas.  Strange!

Even though I had yet to pull a weed, I had to take some time to contemplate this bizarre scene.  I walked the few steps over to the ancient sharecropper's shack that was now being used as a storage shed.   Old hoes, shovels, broken down lawn mowers, empty insecticide cans, old produce baskets and other remnants of a distant past now filled this shack that had once been the home of rural folk working the land.

There was a slant roof off to one side of the shed where I sat to get out of the sun; maybe as some of the tenant farmers who once lived here had.  Using a 5 gallon plastic bucket for a chair, I set about doing some serious thinking about the people that had lived near my garden. 

Sharecropping was a system of farming that began after the Civil War, during reconstruction. The south was flooded with freed slaves as well as poor whites that had to eat, but wanted to have control of their own future. A landowner would provide a place to live, sometimes food, seeds and tools to work the land. 

In return the sharecropper would give the landowner one third to one half of the profits from the crops. This agreement rarely worked out well for the tenant, but it was in many cases the only way those who had no land of their own, had to feed their family.

Sometimes the farmer would make a little extra money when harvest time came, but most, because of debt from borrowing from the landowner, drought or crop failure from insects, the laborer rarely got out of debt to the owner of the farm.

Viewing my pea patch, I realized that whoever had hoed and weeded my garden had done a much better job than I would have done.  Gazing through the neat furrows, I couldn't see even one blade of grass.  I hoped this fellow; whoever he was would come back and work on the corn.

My friend Tom, whose family owns the old pre-civil war plantation where I have my garden, listened to my story and promptly told me that it must have been the ghosts that hang around the old sharecroppers' shacks, reliving some of the work they had done in the past.

How he knew this, I haven't clue, but he told me how he had actually seen ghosts on his property, usually early on summer's evenings when the fireflies suddenly appear in the meadow and frogs are beginning their nightly symphony in the nearby creek bed.

Tom is a descendent of the original plantation owners and he has listened to tails of ghosts all his life and no doubt believes much of it.  I know I do.  Having seen the precision in which the weeds were removed from my purple hull peas, I sincerely hope they come back tonight and tackle the grass in my squash!