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..
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@willymac You have received a random upvote from @transparencybot for not using bidbots on this post and using the #nobidbot tag!
It's amazing what will trigger memories. I wonder how many times you've made that walk under similar circumstances and yet this is the first time this has happened? Is this the actual day of your mother's death?
Thank you for sharing this. It seems like a very intimate memory that you could have kept to yourself if you'd wanted to. It reminded me of the canning my mother would employ us in with tomatoes and peaches. Since I liked both I didn't mind it myself, once I got into it. We also had beans, but I don't recall being a part of that process so much.
And amazingly enough, the pressure canner never did blow up. :)
Mom died in May, so today was just a random memory. Subconsciously, I did hear her voice, so who knows? Memories are funny things the way they do a sudden total recall when a random neuron misfires.
I know someone in his early 40's who does not like his mother and is verbally abusive and non-supportive of her, even though he has a very high income. I know their background and have known them personally since he was a child. I also know he is very wrong in his treatment of his very decent mother. His father abandoned them and she raised the children alone. I think sharing was a gentle reminder to anyone who has forgotten their Mom, to remember her and that she will not be around forever. My mom had a hard life but I respect her more for making it through and giving us the love she did in spite of too many deprivations over the years.
It didn't blow up but Grandma would not go in the kitchen while it was working. The new versions with the steam pressure weight work perfectly. I don't blame people being afraid of the old ones with no pressure release and big screw-down clamps holding the lid on. That's a bomb in the making!
Sharing memories with total strangers is a way to remind me of who I was.
Can't blame Grandma, then. I think our pressure canner was more or less like what you described. This would have been in the late 70s, early 80s, so technology has improved quite a bit sense then. My wife cans occasionally. While we have our youngest and his family living with us for now, it is going to be mostly the two of us so creating a lot of anything probably isn't going to get eaten.
I don't know that I would say that there's a clear or direct purpose for everything, but I might call this more than just a random neuron misfire. If it's only meant for you and me, it still provided a moment of reflection, and those are too often discarded, overlooked, or drowned out.
We use our pressure cooker frequently for cooking kale and the process went from 45 minutes down to one minute! A real time saver. I love homemade, thick veggie soup and it saves half an hour on a two gallon batch. The little weighted pressure valve is virtually foolproof and causes no worries.
Our brains are almost mysterious in how they process data, maybe similar to quantum computing. However it uses input, and for whatever the intended purpose was, the neuron fired based on that processing result and here we are in discussion about memories! In a similar way, the idea was then exchanged beween us as tiny parts of overall human intelligence, acting as human-unit neurons.
Thought and memory are mysteries. Being able to recall such detail at random means that it has been stored for a very long time. Fascnating to think that everything could still be in there!
Meaning, they could be crowded out or overwritten? I'm no brain expert, but if it weren't for aging, new wiring being added, the ability to recall being pushed one way or the other, I bet we'd be able to remember much more than we typically do. My mother can remember things about my life that I don't. Why is that? At different stages in our lives we have access to different stages of our lives? Anyway, it is a fascinating topic.
Technology is awesome, when it works. It might take a while to get there, but I find myself wishing we had what we have now in my youth so I could be much better with it and what's coming next.
As a side note, I'm not sure if you remember the conversation we had on your yard art post, but I did mention you in a post I published yesterday because of that conversation. In case you're interested, you can find that post, and it's bottom reference to our conversation, by clicking here.
The fascinating part to memory for me is that there is so much there! Petabytes of the stuff we don't even know we have and can get only brief, accidental glimpses of. Nature was not kind to give us the memory but no way to access most of it.
Another theory of mine is that is what all of the "unused" part of the DNA code is for. Some day, something will trigger a mutation in someone and that will activate the "unused" part from the single 8088 CPU it is now to a Pentium II and we can draw on the other mental resources we are not capable of now. At least that's something to wish for.
I very often wish I had access to the Internet, YouTube instructional videos, and Khan Academy when I was a child. I could have learned so much more than with the resources (and support) I grew up with. Sadly, we don't get do-overs, though, no matter how nice it would have been.
And thank you for the mention and for remembering our conversation, too. Since you have the Tarbibs frozen in time and on display, I suppose the story must have been true. It just needed a little spark from a neuron!
Will
That was a really lovely post! Memories can be so random, and the odd things that trigger them...
My mom has been gone for 25 years now, so I've kind of gotten used to it, but I still have those memories. I remember picking wild berries with her as a young teen back in the late 1960s, and all the garden produce that she canned every year. So many memories...
I remember more about my mom now than I did a decade ago, maybe because I remember her fondly and regret the extended absences as I got more established in my adult life and job in a different location. It's a shame I missed the additional quality time I could have had. If only....
Very well written, was like I was there with you. And yeah those gnats get annoying, always trying to fly into your ears... and eyes... and mouth...
Whoa! Nice comment, @corpsvalues!
Most of what I remember about our garden itself is the fresh tomatoes and gnats. I had seen a gas mask in a military surplus store once when visiting a cousin in Charlotte when I was about seven and I fantasized all that summer about buying one the next time I went to Charlotte! I was going to be gnat free! I actually did get to visit the store the next spring and found out that the used mask cost more money than I had ever had combined. The gnats won.
I fantasize about a full body hazmat suit when I am mowing and getting swarmed by gnats and horse flies... then I realize that I am dripping sweat wearing shorts and a tshirt and that any additional clothing would probably kill me.
It's either heat stroke or bug bites!
I wear jeans and boots when I'm working outdoors...and most of the rest of the time. Makes life easier at least when I remember to spray OFF on my boots and arms to keep the redbugs and ticks at bay. A fast riding mower helps with the gnats. Thankfully, few horseflies around.
Sadly no riding mower, just 5 acres and a push mower.
That makes my favorite season of the year: winter! Because oddly enough for me, shoveling snow is the easiest outdoor activity of the year.
Oh, Noes! Five acres! That has got to be a major chore to mow all that! You really look forward to the challenge, I suppose. How many times during the growing season do you cut it?
It is pretty much 2-3 hours at the end of every day, 5 days a week. As soon as I am done at one end, it is time to start over. I could do without the challenge because it doesn't leave me much time for improving the property =) but I won't be here too much longer.