Beans

Sunshine on dew-covered grass.

Sometimes the slightest stimulus can open a door in my mind and bring back a memory in full color and sound with added scents and physical stimulus.

This morning, on my walk, my mind was not focused on anything, and I was content being out in the pleasantly cool morning, when I suddenly heard, "Will, Honey, you're gonna get wet, now come on back inside."

It was my mother's voice, just as clear as if she had spoken to me that instant!

I was lying on the grass at the side of our long front porch. It was early morning and the air was already hot and the dew on the grass had not yet evaporated in the morning sunshine. The night had been miserably hot and the open windows did little to make the house comfortable, so being out in the cooler air and pleasantly chilling dew was nice!

I was lying on my back, looking straight up at one of the gray, puffy clumps of fog that was disappearing slowly as I watched. Barn, the neighbor's dog, was barking in his deep, "wooof, wooof" as he did every morning when his people left to go to work, but Barn was far enough away that his sound was just a muffled presence. Country was nice: neighbors were nearby, but not too close. That's the way it was.

The buzz of tiny insects that lived in the grass was a steady sound all around me and could feel one on my arm, but I had never minded that so much because lying on the ground and getting bugs on me went together. They crawled on my ears sometimes and I swatted them because it tickled, but mostly I let them alone.

Next to my head on the right was a dandelion that had a puffball of a seed ball on top and I had been squinting my eyes to look through the little parachutes protruding all around the circular, intricate structure.

"Okay, Momma!" I said in immediate response to her call. Only a second had passed since she called me and interrupted my routine commune with nature from that ground-up viewpoint.

Grandma and Aunt Mary would be coming back this morning and we would shell more butter beans. Momma and I picked beans all day the day before yesterday, and again yesterday morning starting at 6:30 until it got up to a hundred degrees at lunch time and we don't work after that. Grandma and Aunt Mary came after lunch and we started shelling beans. I like that a lot more than picking beans! The gnats were real bad and they get in my ears and nose and I spent more time swatting them than I did picking beans.

We sat on the front porch and had four wash tubs filled with big, fat butterbeans. At first, we didn't have anything to put the shells in so we just dropped them on the floor. Each flat shell had four or five or six beans in it and once I learned the trick (that Mother showed me), I could pull the little green stringy thing along the edge and then separate the two halves and push the white and blue beans fall into the bowl on my lap with my thumb. it was fun to watch the bowl slowly fill up after an hour or something like that.

Mostly what I liked was listening to Momma, Grandma, and Aunt Mary talk about growing up. The radio was on in the living room and we could hear it through the two open windows on the porch but I stopped listening to that and listened to them talk.

We shelled beans all day. Momma made pimento cheese sandwiches and sweet tea for lunch and we ate and shelled, and shelled and ate, and they talked all the time. Momma and Aunt Mary talked about when they were my age and the stories were usually funny and interesting, but I had a hard time making Momma a little girl in my head. They had a horse named Pet, and they had a dog named Heck. Pet had to pull a plow but she got special treatment from the family when she was not working. Grandma said Heck was just a farm dog that the girls thought was a pet, and they made sure he ate better than the family did. Heck lived in the barn with Pet and they liked each other a lot. I wish I remembered all the stories and I'm sorry I didn't pay more attention.

They talked about how good life was now compared to then. That didn't mean anything to me because I didn't even know how things were now, but they seemed pretty good. Except when Aunt Mary told Momma she had more of my cousin's clothes he had outgrown and she would bring them for me. He liked shirts with bright colors and patterns on them and I hated wearing them, but Momma said I should be thankful or I would not have any clothes at all. So, things were better than they used to be, I guess. If times were really better, I would not have to wear that shirt that looked like a Little Abner comic strip. I hated it when Momma made me wear that!

After a while, they started talking about family members and people I didn't know, so I started listening to the radio again instead of them talking. I liked Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, and especially the Sons of the Pioneers because that was "cowboy music" like in the Saturday matinee Westerns. It made me want to see another Gene Autry movie and I thought about him while listening to the music and shelling beans.

"Will, you can clean up the hulls now and put them in the garden," Momma said. "I'm gonna start cleaning the jars so we can start puttin' up beans."

I cleaned up the empty bean pods and took them out to the garden and spread them along the rows. Daddy would plow them under and that would help the garden next year. I was officially dismissed after that because Momma would be using her pressure canner to put up quart jars of beans. Grandma kept telling Momma that the canner was going to blow up and kill all of us, so I didn't mind being excused.

By dinner time, they had finished and there were hot jars of beans sitting all over the kitchen. Momma would get half of the jars, and Grandma and Aunt Mary got the other half. That was because Momma planted them and worked in the garden to raise the beans. I love butterbeans and remembered how good they taste on a cold day at dinnertime.

The memory was gone in two seconds but it was as if it had just heard Mom's voice and it all happened in a flash.

After recalling that, and hearing Mom 's voice, I went through a mild, nostalgia-driven funk for a few minutes.

Mom died eight years ago and her voice sounded so real it's as if I had heard her speak. The sunshine on the dewy grass brought it back - or, maybe even sent me back to that moment in my life.


Mom died eight years ago. I still have her phone number in my contacts list and very often feel an urge to call her number because I get an overwhelming feeling that she would somehow, miraculously, answer and she always did. That is another of the things I hold dear. Just in case it is needed.

Just to say, "Hi, Mom."

"Well, hey, Will!"

I miss you, Mom!

^{The photograph and story are mine, and I retain all rights..}

Comments from real people are welcomed.

Will