Half Runner Beans and Broken Hearts

The end of August is the herald of heartache in my life. For 11 years it's been a bittersweet time, as within a 48 hour span I am handed the anniversary of my beloved niece's birth and the death of a close friend. Add to that the events of last year and frankly, I could skip the end of August ad infinitum. If I could just jump from say, oh, August 20 to around September 4 or so that'd be great.

We recently drove up to the farmers market that's up near the mountains (but not quite IN the mountains) and everything reminded me so much of our huge gardens when I was little.

By the time Matt was born the huge gardens had gone by the wayside. But when I was little my grandparents, parents, and all of my grandparents neighbors all grew gardens that were about a half acre or more in size. They were massive to plant, massive to keep up, and massive to harvest.

It was a normal course of the day to be handed a basket and sent out to the garden to pick food for dinner. I can distinctly remember being shocked to learn, at about age 7, that you could also buy these things at the store. My grandmother had a basement that ran the length and width of her house which had a fruit cellar at one end. It was full of Ball jars with our vegetables for the year.

The farmers market reminded me of those days, when my Mom was young and not dying horribly or dead. She was younger than me, by quite a bit. Those days were so long. The hours in the gardens were interminable, hot and bug laden. I didn't really enjoy them one bit, if I'm honest. I would grumble and stomp around barefoot up and down the aisle, seeking the zucchini that I knew I would be required to eat, or pulling off some tomatoes that I knew I could talk them out of making me eat. Muddy, dusty feet, the smell of earth and green life growing all around me coupled with my mom calling me to hurry up were a theme of my childhood.

It seemed like those days were never going to end, and now I look back and they were forty years ago and I am confused about how that happened exactly. I don't think I could tell you how to can vegetables, or how to tell what's ripe enough to pick.

But I used to know. I was a different person then.