Green Bean Memories.

I am standing in the corner vegetable store. The produce changes regularly due to the seasons, and I need to find something just right to round out today’s lunch.  I quickly scan the small store and my eye lands on green beans.  Perfect! I make a couple of other purchases and hurry home. The hour is late and time has slipped away from me yet again. 

I take the beans to the sink clean them, snap of the ends, and add them to a pot of water to boil.  The water from the faucet hits the beans and the smell of freshly picked green beans fills my nose. 

I go back. 

Back to a time over a dozen years ago.  A time when only squabbles with my brother about who’s turn it was to feed the baby her oatmeal and territorial fights with my sisters, where the only things that made my world a little less than perfect. 

I am sitting in our tree house with my sister.  We had grocery bags full of fresh green beans pilled around us.  We had just picked them from our summer garden.  In our minds of course, we were not in a tree house in the 1990’s in Georgia, but off some extreme wilderness fighting for survival against the natives and preparing for a harsh winter. {There *may* have been a Little House element to it, but I like to think we were just creative, self-entertaining, brilliant children.}    We spent hours snapping beans {which my mother later cleaned and froze}, keeping house, and making blood pacts.  We somehow always survived.  {Or one of us got mad and stomped off into the house, thus ending our adventures.} 

I am back in the present now.  My green beans are cooked and waiting for a certain handsome man to come home.  I wonder where those days have gone and who plays in that tree house now…?  Where do they go?  What adventures do they have?