This past week, I have been absolutely buried in gifts from people's gardens. It started on Friday when a coworker gave me seven pounds of string beans from his summer garden. "Why, thank you. I love string beans." I spent Sunday evening snapping, then steaming them. While I was snapping away it reminded me of how I would perform this chore for my mother since string beans were one of the first foods I was allowed to help with in the food preparation for family dinners.
My family always had a garden, so I got in on the ground floor with this nature's bounty thing. I would help my mother make strawberry jam in the late spring, and then in the summer we would shift to pickles (ice box, bread and butter, dill and okra), and can tomatoes and string beans (AGAIN with the beans!), and later in the summer and fall we would make jams and jellies from the grape vine we had, and we would freeze peaches we'd pick from an orchard out in Maryland and corn would be shucked and frozen, and in the fall we would shell pecans and black walnuts for Christmas cooking. If you don't know, black walnuts in their protective shell will stain your hands dark brown if you aren't careful, and they have the same effect (only worse) of henna.
There was a lot for a child to learn in terms of what to pick and when, and having to stand in a kitchen on a hot summer day surrounded by boiling pickle spices is no treat. We would go to apple orchards in Winchester, Virginia and bring home bushels of apples to make applesauce and apple butter...and all sorts of things. I can remember my mother talking about what a treat it was to thaw frozen peaches and leave a little ice on them to have in the dead of winter. For her, that was a greater luxury than caviar. I know this sounds very "Little House on the Prairie," especially given that I was raised in the city, but this was something my mother had done with her mother, and it was passed down to me.
Today my brother asked me to visit him in the countryside outside of D.C., and I hauled home two bags full of lettuce, squash, herbs, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and yes (heavy sigh), MORE string beans. I was given enough yellow squash to feed me for the next month, so it's either toss it, or go back over a steaming stove and then freeze it. I realize people love the whole principle of having fresh vegetables from their garden during the summer, but I think they forget a lot of it starts coming in at the same time, hence the overload. It turns into garden refuse and "who can we dump this on." The bounty becomes the burden.
My brother had pleaded and cajoled for me to drive out to teach him pointers on how to sell on eBay. How little did I know the dreaded string bean lurked. If you start seeing bags full of vegetables scattered around the city, you'll know I've been there. I will Borf* this town with beans. My tag? "String Bean."
Don't even THINK of giving me any more of these.
*For my out-of-town readers, Borf is a local teen who was arrested recently for smearing the city with his graffiti.
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