Bean there (I know... groan)

     I was happy to see that John brought in some string beans just before lunch today.  I immediately rinsed them in a colander, got out a bowl, and began snipping them.  And just as quickly a familiar memory came to mind, the same one I have every time I snip beans.  I'm sitting on our neighbor’s front porch steps next to to Mrs. P. who is snipping the beans that the vegetable man had just weighed out for her on one of those swinging scales on the back of his truck. 
    I’d already watched that happen from our own porch and then I saw her go inside and come back out.  Now she was aproned and prepared to work.  She squatted her plump self down on those steps, spread out the skirt of her housedress to cradle a large bowl, and began.  By that time I was there at her side.  Eager as always — no doubt, too eager, as usual — but at the same time, abnormally quiet, a learned mannerism.  One learned from her as much as anyone else.  She was of the “seen, but not heard” mindset for children.  But I settled for that readily.  Because — and here’s the climax of the story — every now and then, at an unexpected moment, without skipping a beat or losing her place in whatever she was saying, she would flip one of those pared beans toward me.  Being “seen” still holds a crunchy satisfaction for me!   
    She spoke like a Dutch woman; “broken English” they called it in our neighborhood. Didn’t give that much thought, because it worked fine for me.  Her youngest daughter read my Golden Books to me on our porch on warm summer evenings.  I remember that I had a stack too high and heavy to haul outside all at once while trying to hold the screen door open at the same time so I either had to prop it open or make a few trips back and forth.  Seriously, Golden Books can add up.  She was really, really patient to read and re-read all of those!
    I told all of this to John after Grace.  Probably for the umpteenth time.  “What did the dad do?” he asked.  I had to think hard to picture him.  He was a smaller man, intense, worked for the railroad, I think.  Maybe not.  They moved out after a while.  Afterward the house was rented again and again.  Like most in the neighborhood.  “Where did they move?” A little farther out.  All of us in the neighborhood were planning to move a little farther out when we could manage it.  They landed in a ranch-style, red brick house across from a park.  I had seen it when my mom pointed it out to my dad on a Sunday drive-by some time later.  No porch though.  
    “Renters?” John was asking now.  Yup.  Both sides of us after that.  And up the block too.  Last names rushed to mind.  Then the names of kids, mostly nicknames because no one called anyone Harold.  A mom might call out “Harry” when it was dinner time, but we probably called him Slim or Buster.  Skip was good with a stone on the gravel pit.  Once he threw a rotten tomato at me from the roof of his garage when I was cutting through the alley.  I honestly don’t think he thought it would hit me.  Not that kind of guy.  
    Yes, renters.  The alcoholic dad whose wife and kids came over in for shelter the middle of the night.  The twins that weren’t identical.  Who knew that was a thing until then?  Not me.  The boy with a crossed eye and bottle-bottom thick glasses who, no doubt, became the object lesson for not teasing at several supper tables.  Then there was a woman whose parents had lived in the same house before she did.  She and her husband came with two or three kids littler than me.  I waved at the toddler on their screened in porch so many mornings when I left for school that I think I taught her to wave back.  She always turned her hand toward herself and moved it like she was opening a jar, but I figured that’s what my wave must have looked like to her.  Her mom taught me to knit.  Neither my mom nor Gram were knitters.  She was left-handed so I learned backwards, but still, it worked out pretty well.  Then there was the preacher and his wife who gave their children cod-liver oil.  Eeeww.  He moved to a different state, I think.  I could google their name.  Unusual one.  It doesn’t matter.  Nice people.   
    There were more.  Some of the stories weren’t so average.  Or so good.  So, not for today.  You can only have so much riding on a bean.