A: A Cotton Snake is friendlier than a rattlesnake, and it doesn't bite.

It is doubtful if very many people haven't had an encounter sometime with a blue racer, or a copperhead, maybe a king snake, a chicken snake, or an occasional water moccasin. The Bootheel has a large variety of snakes we would rather avoid.

The Cotton Snake, however, has nothing to do with our reptilian friends.

Cotton, as a vital product of agriculture and industry, is virtually stripped clean of all of its valuable components for human consumption.

An analogy of cotton's seemingly limitless potential could be the baked ham. Once out of the oven and cooked to perfection, the choice is sliced and served. Meat that is left can be chopped and seasoned to make ham salad, or cooked with potatoes for a ham and potato casserole. The bone can be added to bean soup to embellish the flavor, and when sapped of all possible energy it is thrown to a tail wagging dog for hours of happy gnawing. Thus is the similar journey of cotton.

Cotton, from the fields, and all the procedures along the way, has name identifications that vary from process to process. Some can be found in the dictionary, and some are peculiar to the industry, with no known origin.

Cotton squares are routinely identified by anyone in cotton country, and even the most uninformed urbanite might have a faint recognition of such terms as: cotton bolls, hulls, lint, or cotton seed.

Squidges, motes, pearls, and the Rudd Machine (or however it's spelled) are only known by a unique group of people who are also aware that no city slicker is ever going to to step on, or be bitten by a Cotton Snake.

Once cotton has been ginned and baled it acquires an individuality of its own. Samples must be cut from the bales because the buying and selling of cotton is based on the inspection and classification of samples. The judgment of these samples as to quality and staple length is done in classing rooms.

Cotton classing rooms appear pristinely white by the nature of cotton itself, but the busy classers are recklessly indifferent to how much waste falls to the floor; that plus the fact that samples once evaluated are dumped into a loose bin like beer cans that have been drained of their nectar.

Then begins a metamorphosis into some semblance of respectability whereby the loose cotton on the floor, and the samples thrown into the loose bin, are gathered and wrapped with burlap to form a fat snake appearing package. Shazam!! A Cotton Snake. No fangs. No scales. It doesn't slither across the floor.

Enter: A Pickery Company. Don't bother looking for it in the dictionary. The cotton business is not hung up on grammatical niceties.

What better name than Pickery Company for an organization that buys the Cotton Snakes; that "picks" out all foreign objects, re-gins the cotton and sells the bales to the mills? The mills are another story unto themselves, but for the cotton merchant, the meat has gone about as far as it can go, and the dog is ready for the bone.

An interesting sideline to loose cotton was the Rudd Machine. It may be under wrong spelling because it was probably named for some fellow whose name is obscure in technological history. We'll settle for Rudd Machine, and expect to be contradicted.

What the Rudd Machine looked like will have to be left up to someone who saw it in action, but its primary function was to pick up loose cotton that had been left in the field after picking. There was also a time when dusty roads in the Bootheel and county highways were lined with a colorful trail of cotton that had been blown from wagons or trucks. People say the Rudd Machine could gobble this up also.

Way back in Civil War time that white stuff in the fields was called "King Cotton." For sure it has produced a number of cotton kings who owe their wealth to this utilitarian fiber. But cotton has had many more serfs, squidges, motes, pearls, pickeries. Rudd Machines, and Cotton Snakes.