When Life Hands You Green Beans

Sunday morning, I woke up dreaming about coffee on the deck, the purple martins doing their thing, and a little quiet time with God. We’ve worked hard for that oasis. I felt entitled to it.

The beans had other plans.

I looked out the bedroom window and saw my husband’s backside sticking straight up out of the garden, which, in forty years of marriage, I have learned means exactly one thing: it is bean day, and nobody consulted me. I would love to tell you I rose to the occasion with grace and gratitude for the abundance of God’s green and humid earth. Instead, I put on lightweight pants, compression sleeves, a long-sleeved shirt, and gardening gloves—on an 85-degree morning with Mexico-in-August humidity—because if I was going down, I was going down prepared.

My husband took one look at me coming across the yard, and I’m fairly sure his internal monologue was, This woman is dressed for war.

“Good morning,” I said. What I meant was, This is the part of gardening I hate—the part where I have to do it instead of sitting on the patio enjoying the finished product like a normal person.

He, in the kind and entirely reasonable voice that was not helping my attitude, said I could sit down and he’d pick. He knows the heat has been triggering me all summer. I’ve already had two rounds of heat illness this year, due to the compression sleeves and all. And I, in good conscience, could not sit there and watch my husband suffer alone in a bean patch.

Guilt is an excellent gardening tool. Someone should sell it in seed packets.

So we picked. He went down his row. In my mind, I wanted to race to see who could pick faster, but I kept getting distracted every few feet by a weed that I know wasn’t there last week.

Where do they even come from? How do they grow so tall when I never planted them, never watered them, and certainly never invited them?

It occurred to me, crouched there sweating through my long sleeves, that this is basically my whole spiritual life in a garden bed.

You plant. You tend. It grows.

And right about the time you’re admiring the harvest, you realize there is something towering over your good fruit that you did not plant on purpose and definitely did not water. It just showed up and made itself at home the second you stopped looking.

Three pans later, we had our answer to the question, “What do we do with the blessing?”

It meant the pressure canner. It meant giving up my Sunday afternoon of book edits for a Sunday afternoon of jar lids.

Did I mention South Dakota is in a heat wave?

In years past, we’ve canned in the kitchen, which turns the house into a sauna for approximately three days. This year, my husband had an idea.

“Let’s can out in the garage.” “Good idea in theory,” I said, meaning, This sounds like more work disguised as innovation. And I was right, because now it involved hauling jars, hauling water, and moving the patio table into the garage so we would have somewhere to set things down.

There went my afternoon of writing. There went my stinking attitude, which I recognized and did very little about.

We divided the labor like the efficient, loving team we are: he cut beans and watched a movie. I stood at the sink and washed every single bean by hand, wearing the long-suffering expression of a woman who had been personally wronged by produce.

I put in my earbuds, pulled up the new Little House on the Prairie, and let Laura Ingalls talk me down off the ledge. I loved everything Little House as a child. Laura Ingalls Wilder was my hero. For my birthday in third grade, my parents gave me the perfect gift: the complete Little House series. I still have those books. I loved Laura and her family so much that I remember my grandma taking me to the bookstore to see whether there were any other “Laura books.” This is not relevant to the beans. I’m telling you anyway.

Each sink load of beans took exactly one episode. Wash the beans. Fill the jars. Empty the sink. Run new water. Start the next pan. Start the next episode.

By 2:30, we had the first canner going, and I thought, Not bad. We’ll be done by early evening, get to bed at a decent hour, and start the week off right.

The second canner went in.

I took some Advil because my hips and legs had developed strong opinions about standing at a sink for four hours.

The third canner went in.

We ran out of pint jars and switched to quarts, which, if you can, you understand is the canning equivalent of finding out your flight has a layover.

The last canner went in at 10 p.m.

What we had not accounted for was that a garage burner is a temperamental beast. It was harder to keep at temperature, harder to monitor, and we were topping off the pressure canner with water straight from the hose, which meant heating it from scratch every single time instead of starting with warm water.

My husband shut off the burner at 11:30.

I turned off the lights.

We went to bed having thoroughly failed at “early.”

Forty-eight pints and six quarts later, here is what I know.

I love planting things and watching them grow. I love harvesting enough for our everyday meals. I love a full shelf of jars more than is probably healthy. I am also deeply grateful for a husband who will stand over a garage burner until nearly midnight without complaining once, which, compared to my performance that day, makes him the actual hero of this story.

Watching the Ingalls family face far harder days with far fewer conveniences gave me some much-needed perspective. I still wasn’t giving up running water, Advil, or Netflix, but I appreciated them more.

Maybe this is the part of abundance I forget.

We pray for the seeds to grow. We ask God to bless the work of our hands. We hope the things we plant will flourish and produce something good. Then the blessing ripens all at once and interrupts the Sunday we had planned.

It needs to be picked, washed, trimmed, carried, and preserved.

Sometimes gratitude looks like coffee on the patio while the birds sing. And sometimes it looks like standing beside someone you love at 10 p.m., filling the last six quart jars.

So yes, I am thankful.

For a husband who picks beans at dawn. For a bounty we did not have to work nearly as hard for as our ancestors did. For shelves that are full.

And for a God who keeps reminding me that blessings are not always convenient, but they are still blessings.

Forty-eight pints and six quarts later, my heart is grateful, the shelves are full, and my hips have filed a formal complaint.

Next week, we get to do it all again. :)