Green Beans

Mom and I harvested approximately 150 cups of green beans today from my auntie's garden.  It has been years, maybe even decades, since I've picked beans with Mom.  I had to smile a little when she shouted across the rows a reminder to "pick'em close."

 

As if I knew any other way to pick them! I believe I've had more green bean picking training than all other types of preparation (academic, life skills, or otherwise) combined!  Though I've come to realize, later in life, that my veggie and berry picking skills may be specific to my matriarchal line.  These truths I know in my bones:

Truth 1: If you don't pick green beans close, you have to pick them EVERY DAY. If you want to do something fun tomorrow, you better pick those beans CLOSE today!

Truth 2: If you don't pick clean, you will spend your afternoon cleaning beans instead of playing, while your mother describes, in detail, the subtleties of how to snap a bean off the bush perfectly, without sacrificing any length of bean, or damaging the brittle vines or delicate blossoms of the bush.

Truth 3: Bean season doesn't end until Mom says it does. At which point, the vines are ripped up with exhausted, exasperated viciousness, and thrown over the fence to the eager cows.

Every woman in my excessively large rural family had a monster of a garden and put up a year's-worth of food during our short Northern Minnesota growing season. I don't know how other kids spent their summers because I was too busy spending my childhood planting, weeding, picking, snapping, washing, cutting, and filling canning jars with green beans. If my sister and I didn't pick the beans closely enough on the first try, we had to pick the row again. Mom definitely checked our work. If she found one missed bean of appropriate picking size, we had to repeat the row.

I'm not complaining. I'm rather proud of the fact that I know how to pick "close" and "clean." It just made me smile that Mom thought she should remind me.