Bean Bugs
In my Nostalgia Era
I find it wild how much the same Thing-In-Existence is shaped by how we view it, how our expectations color its goodness or flaws.
I am such a bad gardener. I’ve embraced that gardening is so healing and beautiful that I’m not going to give up just because I’m bad at it, but it means that the way I garden isn’t for everyone. I invest very little in it, since I know that I won’t be diligent enough to reap piles and piles of produce come August. I let weeds and morning glories snake all the way over my plants, stressing them and causing all manner of dysfunction. Still, I celebrate every tomato and squash, knowing that they had to survival-of-the-fittest their way to life because everyone knows I didn’t weed that garden.
That being said, this has been my best year ever when it comes to diligence. We have a big garden patch and my son is older now and I’ve been working less (#thanksAI), so there’s been time to take my latent, barely-under-the-surface rage at everything out on tons of dock and dandelions, laying bare ground around the calendula and the tomatoes and the chamomile (I grew chamomile for the first time! Little old me!). The new variety of beans I planted has been incredible, just beautiful and flavorful and prolific, toe to toe with the morning glories.
But this profusion of joy and fruit has another side. There are still tons of morning glories - the watermelons rotted while tiny - weeds swallowed up the swiss chard. Daily life interfered with gardening for about a month, and it was an important month, so I’m not shocked. My cousin who lives with me used to work for a farm, carefully tending every plant and weeding it and making sure it had what it needed for actual thriving, so this garden looks like failure to her sometimes. It’s strange to look at the same chaotic snarl of plant life while we stand side-by-side, me in absolute awe of what is now possible after years of nothing, her working to see what was there rather than what was missing.
When she saw a picture of the velvety blue-black beans I’d been harvesting and drying, she mentioned that she hoped to pick a crop that was more productive next year. I see the point - she wants our garden to be part of how we sustain ourselves, and growing things we can actually sell for a reasonable margin gives us freedom to expand the garden and share our joy with others. Beans cost so, so little in our current food system.
But also, beans growing in drapery-style curtains of abundance as they curl up the cornstalks as a trellis are really, really beautiful. This variety turns purple on the vine, helping them standout when it’s time to pick them for the ripe beans, or I can pick them when tender and green and add them to stir fries or stovetop cook them with a little bacon like my grandma.
My grandparents kept a big garden despite my grandfather being a doctor. They grew up in the 30s and their early career years were in nonprofit medical work in other countries, so their own financial comfort arrived much later in life, after the habits of growing things as a secondary job and part of their home were already cemented.
My grandfather would dress in his coveralls that always, even when clean, smelled very very faintly like car oil or gas or both, and he’d go out and pick a whole bucket of beans. He’d bring them in and we’d sit together and snap each bean: snap the end, pull the strings off, do the same on the other side, then snap longer beans into bite-sized pieces. Snapping beans in the evenings has become an absolute meditation for me, a way to access the exact feeling of being with my grandfather, who passed 8 years ago and who began fading a decade before that.
He always had a little cup of soapy water beside him when he was snapping beans. “For the bean bugs,” he said, and would drop the weird little yellow creatures into it so that they wouldn’t overrun the house or the crops.
Now, I see the little yellow alien-looking bean bugs crawling on my own crops. I sit and work and think about how much my gentle, easygoing grandfather was like my gentle, easygoing husband, how much they’d like each other even though they didn’t get to spend much time together. I think how much my grandmother would have loved my son, would have found his zesty pugnacious spirit to be a good jostling for my perhaps-too-peaceful lifestyle. I get a little misty, and there aren’t even onions cooking.
These are the things that a garden brings that don’t contribute to the budget. I get the impulse to try to make the $150 spent on bags of compost and seeds and fertilizer and plants translate to $300 of produce, or some other calculation. But these days, all that matters is all that growth. How I’ve spent years focused on all the lack in the garden, all my faults, and how this year, my brain was healthy enough to choose joy: to see the beans and the bean bugs, to teach my son that the ripe berries were the black ones and to leave the red ones for another day, to be gifted an hour of uninterrupted time and, instead of getting overwhelmed, picking one plant to free from its weedy cages.
I cannot take much credit for this change. I think time did it, not me. But if we are beneficiaries of grace, I think that gratitude seems appropriate. Con-grat-ulations = being thankful together? Me, and the ground, are thankful together this year.
Just lovely, Laura. ❤️