MindSpinner

Last night was made all of rain, thunder, and lightning that spidered white across half the sky. The homecoming game ended abruptly in the first half, when a sudden, long-fingered fist of light opened and ripped from east to west, then closed back into the dark with a ponderous roll of thunder. A night of a thousand daybreaks ensued. At 2:30 in the morning I pulled a pillow over my eyes.

Outside this morning, when the rain abated for an hour, the water garden, the dog bowls, and a garden bucket all brimmed with water. I headed out with a blue wire basket to pick yellow beans.

If yellow beans have a name other than yellow beans, I do not know what it is. If they are traditionally grown outside of the confines of a single Georgia mountain valley, I do not know where that is. The seed has been passed down for generations in my family, and now that my mother, at 77, can no longer raise a garden, and my aunt and uncle are likewise past the task, I don’t know whether anyone else besides me is growing them at all, though I hope so. The mountain valley, like the area where I live now, lies in Zone 6, so I have long had hopes of growing yellow beans. Until this year, I had not had much success. The summers here are hotter, and the soil is different. Last year’s spindly vines produced only a handful of beans. I left them where they grew. Over winter, they dried and fell into the soil, and early last summer, the strongest of them grew into three volunteer bean plants. I worked organic matter into the soil around them, hoping to make them happier with their new home.

For months I succeeded only in growing only lush green vines (the soil now being too rich) that wended their way over an arbor and into the blackberries, the grapes, and a nearby rose. Finally, in early fall, the vines began to bloom, and shortly thereafter, about three weekends ago, I began to pick yellow beans.

Yellow beans do not taste like green beans or any other sort of bean I’ve ever eaten. They are not a wax bean. I want to say they have a nutty flavor, but that’s not accurate enough to be helpful. (You won’t know whether you like them until you’ve eaten them - I like them better than any sort of green bean.) The beans themselves are a dusky purple gray, and the hulls, when mature, change from a soft green to yellow and offer a hint of texture on the tongue. The hulls are flatter than a green bean hull, which is round like a pencil, and the shape of the oval bean within is more visibly pronounced. The vines like to grow tall and then stretch out horizontally for light. Where they find their light, they make their beans. Next year I will build them an arbor. At home, my mother trained them up stalks of field corn, as her grandmother and great grandmother did, in the Cherokee way, but I’m not planning on field corn since I can’t use it for animal feed.

I would not have these beans lost to the world or to my garden or to my table. I would no more give up the growing of them than I would dash my great great grandmother’s blue milk pitcher to pieces on the floor. They are heritage. They link my fingers that plant and break and prepare them to the fingers of my foremothers, breaking the same beans with the same quick, practiced motion. I can see in my hands the hands of stern-faced women I’ve known only from faded photographs, seated in hand-caned chairs in front of an open cabin door.

I’m going downstairs to have some of them for lunch.