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.