Green Beans

Cousin Becky called today and said that Uncle Jack had green beans that needed picking, and she wanted to know if I wanted to pick them.  Well, I most certainly did, considering that my green beans didn't come up at all (twice).  I looked around the house for something to put the beans in as I picked them, and came up with a big blue plastic tub, the kind that would hold three bed pillows if you smash them down and snapped the lid on real quick. 

The first thing Uncle Jack said when he saw it was, "Your bucket ain't big enough."

I thought to myself, "Oh, shit!" 

Might have said it out loud, now that I think about it.

Uncle Jack went to the garden with me, bringing his own 5-gallon bucket.  His green beans are runners - rattlesnake beans - and he had them running up a sturdy hog-wire fence.  He picked on one side of the fence, and I picked on the other.  We did some good gossiping through the vines.  I'm not Catholic and have never been in a confessional, but picking green beans with Uncle Jack was kind of like what I imagine the confession process would be - talking to someone you can't see, and having them talk back!

Anyway, as we were picking, I thought about a local conservative talk-radio station conversation I'd heard on the way over.  The subject was California's new proposal that restaurants may turn away families with young children.  By far the largest consensus among the primarily Southern callers was that modern children need more discipline, so they would know better than to act up in a restaurant.  One caller said, "Why, if I'd acted like that when I was a kid, the minute we got home my mama would have sent me to the back yard to cut a switch for a whippin', and I'd better not cut one too little, either!"

I thought about my own childhood, and couldn't remember ever getting a whippin' with a switch.  My daddy whipped me with a razor strop once, punishment for deliberately disobeying his order not to cut off my doll's foot after he warned me that I'd get a spanking if I did the deed.  (In my defense, I had two male cousins in the background, egging me on.  He waited until they left before delivering on his promise.  I'd sweated it the whole time.)  That's the only spanking I remember getting from him.  My mother, on the other hand, had a more hands-on, shock-and-awe approach.  If you pissed her off or misbehaved, she'd haul off and smack you with her hand at the first place she could reach - cheeks, forearms, thighs, butt.  No warning.  Just whack!  But I didn't remember a switch.

I asked Uncle Jack if his mama had ever made him cut his own switch for a whippin'.  Indeed, she had, he said, and on more than one occasion.  He said his father, like mine, had been slow to administer punishment, but his mother, a little bitty banty hen of a woman, was just the opposite.  He said that whenever she whipped one child (3 boys), she whipped them all, regardless of who did what, and she grabbed the closest thing handy to whack them with.  As I was contemplating how whipping all the kids at once probably cut down on sibling tattling, Uncle Jack said, "I remember the last whippin' Mama ever gave us."

He said he didn't remember what they'd done to need a whippin', but it made his mother mad enough to get after them with a broom.  He said, "We just took the broom away from her and laughed at her.  She never did try to whip us no more."

I wish I'd asked which of the three boys first suggested resistance.  ;)

We moved on to other subjects:  grandchildren, gardening, the weather.  By the end of the row, he'd filled up his bucket, and mine was almost full.  We managed to pack them all in my tub.  While I wasn't looking, he sneaked five giant zucchini in my Jeep.  Maybe I'll make him some zucchini bread.

But, first, I have to do something with all these beans.  The Husband and I snapped them all tonight, and ended up with a 13-gallon bag half full of beans, ready to be washed and canned.  We pulled the canning equipment out of the attic tonight.  Guess what I'll be doing tomorrow.