Worth a Hill of Beans

When we pulled into the drive after work Don said “I think those beans are about ready for picking.” He didn't get the words out of his mouth good before I was planning to get my basket and head outside, hotter than Hannah or not. Late June, heat advisory and not enough moisture in the air to work up a good spit. Oh yes, me, butter beans and a day like this go way back, 1974 to be exact. As I bent over the knee high bushes that Don planted I heard the voices of those gone now. My mother;
"Why don't you pick them in the morning, when it's cool outside?
"Can those short's get any shorter?"
"When the mailman comes by stand up, don't want you running him off the road."
Daddy; "3 beans per hole" he told my brother, sister and I on planting day as he walked ahead of us placing a divot in the sandy soil every 3 or 4 foot.
On harvest day, "There's a certain way a butter bean feels when it wants to be picked, it's fat and feels like it’s about to bust open."
Examining our baskets after we picked a few plants he'd pick up a flat bean and tell us, "I didn't plant all these beans to eat snaps, Lawd, when are y'all gonna learn to listen?"
I loved picking the beans, it felt as if I was finding treasures over and over hidden beneath. After the freezer had it's fill of beans Daddy told us that we could pick and sell the rest and keep the money. My sister and I still remember what we bought with our first "salary." I don't know what they go for now, but we got $30 a bushel in l974.
I would lather up in butter, yes butter. When you live 40 minutes from a grocery store, cocoa butter's cousin "just butter" had to suffice. I pulled on my sassy blue jean cut offs on with a halter top and headed to the field around 10 o'clock when the sun sucked the dew off the plants. I could pick about a bushel and a half in a couple of hours.
I'm not going to go so far as to say those were the good ole days. But butter beans and me, well we were thick. I could do a lot of figuring out there in that field. And there was nothing so sedating back then for me than sitting in one spot in a rocker with a basket full of beans to shell.
I don't remember Daddy planting many more butter beans after all of us were out on our own. He had a bad back and couldn't do the bending for too long.
Don and I moved to NC for the next 25 years, butter beans weren't a viable crop there for some reason, probably the rocky clay soil. Don's step-mother would go down to her family homestead in SC during butter bean season and pick to her hearts content every year. When she came home I helped her shell them sometimes and she would give me a stingy little mess to bring home. I totally understood, I knew how much work it took to get a little pot of them and I really loved to shell them.
This is our first crop of butter beans in the tall pines, Don has some killer bean gene's. Some things have changed and some haven't out here in the bean field. The blazing South Carolina sun between my shoulder blades is the same but 40 years later I won't be running a mailman off the road while bunked over picking these rows. I sat and shelled my basket of beans in the rocking chair on my porch, went in and washed them and put them on the stove. A bonafide good "mess" of Southern butter beans.

Snowy, The Best "Good Girl" in the Whole Wide World

Three days ago was a red letter day. We lost our Snowy.
A plethora of pain and grief assaults us in waves as volatile as our Charleston summer weather, dry as a bone one minute, drenched and submerged in puddles the next.  I didn't want to add to the cornucopia of heart-wrenching books, essays and movies on losing a dog, but here I am. I cried my eyeballs out through most of these without ever having lost a pet. Garden and Gun has been known to have me snorting and blowing all over their magazine pages with their dog stories and Dean Koontz wrote THE best memoir and possibly the second best book I have ever read on losing his dog. No, I'm selfishly writing this to bleed on my keyboard one last time about the best good girl in the whole wide world.
Snowy Biscuit Brabham 1.1.2000 - 6.14.18. The vet gave her this birthday, probably because it looked good on paper and he figured she was at least 6 months old when we brought her to him for her first check up. She adopted us. The story is a long one, condensing would be the equivalent of opening and eating a can of cold, condensed she crab soup without the cream, sherry, milk, butter and —  if you are reading this, you already know the stories that make up our girl.
The pain we feel is debilitating and that is not an exaggeration! If it is possible to dehydrate yourself from shedding tears, it has been done here. She loved Don and I both equally and us her. She was our shadow from day one so we feel as if we have lost an appendage of ourselves with her gone. In all of her 18 years with us we only took vacations that included her, with the exception of the tree-house trek down the Edisto River and a mountain trip and even then it was close family that watched her. She never stayed the night at at someones home, was never boarded or had hired sitter's, never left at a groomer's and never alone in a vet's office. So, needless to say, we can't hide anywhere from the pain. We can't go outside without seeing her sprawled in the grass, we don't even want her poop to go away in the yard, we can't open the frig without thinking she is watching (for a treat), I can't cook without seeing her beautiful doe eyes looking up at me, we can't watch TV without her warm pig like belly touching our toes, we avoid looking at where she laid in our bed, there are only two rooms in our home that she didn't visit and they are too small to live in for the next however long it takes to get through this.
She went with us everywhere! So right now, the floodgates open each time we go to the dump (her favorite), to the gas station (liver and tater wedges), sit on the porch, look at lizards, frogs, squirrels, rabbits. It's endless. And yet, I am grateful that she touched every aspect of our lives and NEVER want to remove her memory from a single place she has been. So we work through it.
It's so hard to separate her dying from her living right now but I know that those days will come. She was loved by so many people. Her brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins and friends, and last but not least her vets in both NC and SC. She never considered herself to be a dog, so thought it beneath her to sit on the floor in a vet's office and would jump on a chair beside me. Gratefully, she was loved enough that her haughtiness was forgiven by the caretakers. She was even given special non-office hours by our friend and her last vet in SC. The sweet card and handkerchief put into my hand from them sits on the table. In return I left a puddle of saline on their shoulders.
The first night home without Snowy Don said "You know what? When we pulled in the driveway our home didn't look as beautiful as it did before."
No sweetheart it doesn't. Nor is the sky quite as blue or the grass as green or the flowers as vibrant. And that is because as Dean Koontz wrote “Once you have had a wonderful dog, a life without one, is a life diminished.” 
“No matter how close we are to another person, few human relationships are as free from strife, disagreement, and frustration as is the relationship you have with a good dog. Few human beings give of themselves to another as a dog gives of itself. I also suspect that we cherish dogs because their unblemished souls make us wish - consciously or unconsciously - that we were as innocent as they are, and make us yearn for a place where innocence is universal and where the meanness, the betrayals, and the cruelties of this world are unknown.”
― Dean Koontz, A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog
We are healing, at snail's pace. I have pounded the earth blinded by tears and asked God for this healing to be speedier but I stopped doing that because he graciously gave her to us. I will accept this pain for what I gained in return, 18 years of life with the "Best GOOD GIRL in the whole wide world."

#OldYelleraintgotsquatonthebrabhamhouserightnow