Most of us have that amazing memory from when we first felt independence. For some people it is getting their license or buying a car or just something major in their life. I felt like I got my independents the summer after my 6th grade year and it has helped me learn lots of responsibilities.

I was sitting in my room not caring about anything just living life eating and sleeping all day and not having to wear anything but boxers until it was time for football practice. I was walking down stair to go to practice and my mom got a message on Facebook from Amy Brown ,Marshall and Walker’s mom, saying that she needed hard working men for a bean walking crew and without even asking me my mom told her I would do it. At first I was pretty upset at her because I did not want to spend my summer waking up at 4 a.m. then working all day then going to football practice. I was mad at my mom until I heard who was all working with me and I thought to myself “this couldn’t be that bad.”

It was the first day and my mom came in my room at 4 and said “come on get up it’s time for work”. Me being the lazy teenager I was, I was moody and didn’t like it at all and all I wanted to do was go back to sleep but we got to Amy’s house and I walked in and it looked like a graveyard. There were about 12 of us and everyone was asleep, there were guys on the dog bed asleep on the cold hard tile floor all the couches and chairs were full and so I walked into the kitchen to tell her I was there and Marshall was asleep at the table with a half eaten waffle and some eggs. Amy greeted me with a nice welcome and a plate of bacon and eggs and I sat down and before I knew it I was being woken up by Ziak saying that we were leaving.

We got to the fields and I knew nothing about walking beans or anything in general about farming so I asked Ziak what we did he said “see all those weeds out there, we have to cut all of them out”. I looked at the field across the street that had no weeds in it and I said so they are paying us $10 an hour to walk and he said “wrong field buddy look over there”. I may seem like I am exaggerating but I swear that I thought it was a pasture next to us just because there were more weeds than there were beans in all 105 acres of that field. When we were walking into the field the beans were up to my shoulders and they made me carry a flag so they wouldn’t lose me. They told us what to do and then they started handing us hoes and told us to get started, so we all started hacking away at what seeming like a forest but was really just 8 foot tall weeds and buy the time we got to the other end of the field it was lunch time so we loaded into the trucks and went to Dairy Queen and our main boss, the owner of the field, spent about $150 on us for lunch.

Being independent can be a lot of fun but you also have to remember your responsibilities. If you have a job it's ok to fool around a little bit but as we learned that summer the guys that were fooling around out there got fired and they didn’t get paid for the work they did so just keep that in mind and you should be set.