Memories in the Bean Patch

There's nothing like picking beans to make me nostalgic.

I'm kneeling in the dirt, picking through the sticky clingy leaves to pick handful upon handful of green beans, and suddenly it's the summer between fifth and sixth grade. My sister, Anna, and I have headed out to the garden at our usual 9 a.m. to pick beans before the sun gets too blazing, but it's still hot, and we're beginning to sweat and wonder just how thorough of a picking job we need to do. There are two kittens in the barn just begging to be played with, whose milk has curdled in the summer heat and who are growing braver and braver as they explore their dusty, straw-filled domain. The VCR in the living room is faithfully recording the morning rerun of I Love Lucy, which we'll watch in the cool house as we snap our beans.

It's that summer before real life begins. The summer when bras are an exciting novelty, when the idea of a school day without recess is strange and intimidating, when boy-girl parties feel a bit too grown up. That time when sex is still a swearword (whose meaning I don't yet know) and my one-piece hasn't yet been replaced by a bikini. (For most girls it's the summer when you begin shaving your legs, but of course I jumped the gun on that one back in fourth grade—just why I have yet to guess.) It's that bridge between childhood and adolescence, between elementary school and middle school. When it's still okay to act your age before you decide to always try to be older than you are.

Within a year I will have bought my first makeup. I'll have learned that "Abercrombie" on a shirt is synonymous with "popular." Within two years I'll have felt the true sting of rejection and knowing what it's like to want to eat lunch in the bathroom. Then I'll have had the guts to ask to eat lunch with a girl I only kind of know, striking a friendship that will shape who I become. I'll have had my first boyfriend and been dumped by my first boyfriend. I'll have moved my oldest sister into a college dorm and felt the first sadness of growing up. Within three years I'll have learned that bodies don't always grow straight the way they should. I'll have danced with the boy of my dreams and had a first kiss with a boy who was okay, but not the boy of my dreams. And then suddenly it's high school.

As I plop bean after bean into my bowl, I could be 12 again. But then I remember that these are beans I've planted myself in my own garden and watched grow with anxious pride. My bean-picking partner is a momma, and my oldest sister is a momma, and those girls who stood outside the door giggling while I had my first kiss are women with careers and houses and families on the way. And I'm living 2,000 miles away from that childhood garden, married to the new boy of my dreams, trying to savor being young and healthy and carefree, wondering if I'll look back on this bean-picking summer and see it as a bridge between now and some scary new season.

For now, though, I'm just picking beans.