Hills of beans

So it starts off this way. My child greets me at the front steps of his school on a day near to end-of-curriculum year. He hands over a plant, lovingly cultivated from seed. It’s a bean vine, rooted in a clear plastic drinking cup and now sprouted to the length of my forearm. Taped to the cup container is a note in grade-two penmanship: “thank you for bean awesome”. This from an eight-year-old with Father’s Day just around the corner is plain awesome for anyone.

What is also awesome and immediately clear is the gawd-awful responsibility you have just been handed. Anyone faced with transporting an extra-fragile school project affair home gets how this kind of emotionally charged stuff is upper-stratosphere terrifying.

Gingerly, we (or rather I) guide ‘bean happy’, as he/she/it is now known, to the truck. Happy is snuggled into place, carefully supported by whatever I can grab: a ragged wool blanket, a snow shovel plus two books from the library. The impromptu engineering of a bean-plant fortress is unquestionably, in my view, guaranteed to safeguard Happy on his/her/its journey. The drive home with son Luc is chatty and upbeat. We pull into the driveway, slide out of the vehicle, go to retrieve Happy…and it’s about now when things become less than well, happy.

The combination of rock-hard truck suspension and rickety Old Danforth Road has conspired to undo me. Along with Catherine the Great. Yes, her. The 600-page, hardcover and now past-due library copy of Catherine’s life and times has failed. Simply put, the 18th century Russian Queen became unhinged during the ride home and thoughtlessly leaned on Happy causing great chagrin all-round. While Catherine may have believed that the task of good government was education, she has left Happy bent in places where he/she/it ought not to be. Worst of all, the wounds appear to be…well, inoperable.

Now I’m as bent as Happy is. It’s the very moment when any one of us wishes to be anyplace other than where we are. “I’m sure Happy can be repaired,” I fumble for cover-up. “How? Oh, mmm, duct tape, plaster cast, string from the ceiling maybe?” My son is not buying it. “How about we plant it in the garden and (I pray) a new shoot will spring up, why not?” I lie. There are no tooth fairies in bean land.

We finally settle on the magic gardencomeback proposal just to help restore calm. Yet, somehow, planting Happy doesn’t take on the spirit of redemption I’d hoped for. I grope for a list of distractions and responses to questions to stall answering the obvious: “when and how long will it take Happy to revive?” I think of fables and tales; the golden beans, Jack and his crowd? The truth is I’m skating.

I seek out bean advice; bean care; the bean gods; I imagine bean resurrection. Clever solutions are offered by folks who have ‘bean there’. Most don’t hold hope for the magic I dream for. Try researching the topic of beans sometime and discover for yourself how days can easily slide by. By now, time is running out. Happy is in an increasingly unhappy state. Knowing Luc’s tenacity to want to see his bean vine re-sprout from the ashes, I give in to the below the radar strategy. It’s off to Nash’s hardware store, where close to the front door, third row down, over on the right, in the vegetable seed rack awaits a saviour. Beans; Haricot; BushBlueLake improved 274. Parent-dilemma relief for a mere $3.99 plus tax? Not.

Maybe it’s the human condition or perhaps my way of operating, but it seems once an initial dilemma is partially resolved, I tend to slack off and move on to the next thing, or rather the list of things that need resolving. After bringing bean packet 274 home, I forget it in my shirt pocket only to have it rescued for me three days later by the lady at the washand- fold. Then the packet is tucked into the kitchen-table drawer; out of sight for Luc; out of mind for me. Except when a couple of weeks lapse and Luc questions our plant progress I start into another ramble about plant therapy and time and patience and water and Jack’s successful beanstalk. Luc agrees to go with the picture. For now. Finally, Canada Day is past, July gone. And hell, it was only a week ago that I read the instructions: plant after danger of frost—we might be safe here; seedlings emerge in 7-14 days; thin to stand 15cm apart when seedlings are 2.5-5cm high. The bean messengers have come calling the very moment I am dressing to attend a theatre performance. It says 58 days on the packet; I do the math on the calendar while buttoning my shirt; it’s clear that planting is a matter of now or never. I check into the garden before the theatre and in the glow of sunset, I plant my store-bought bean seeds in the spot where Happy rests. To be honest, I plant a handful. Yes, planting a handful may better the odds.

Very soon after, I get signals from the bean cosmos. I’m at the theatre and reach into my pocket for a cough drop to find that not only the cough drops have escaped their package, so have a million beans. An act precipitated by my failing to seal and store the package after my earlier covert mission.

I delicately extricate hand from pocket; amazed by the sound that even one bean—let alone a half-dozen—can make when falling to a wooden floor in the dark and silence of a stage performance. My friend sitting next to me is not impressed. Intermission comes. I search around my feet. Quickly gone is evidence of having bean the culprit.

Its now later that evening. I’m readying to hit the sack. I’ve long forgotten about the opened bean packet in my pocket. I toss my trousers over the chair. The problem here is that the floors of my house are plank floors. Very old plank floors with gaps between the boards; gaps wide and deep and long. Furrow-like in places as in a newly ploughed field. Should I have the misfortune of rain coming in an inadvertently left-open skylight, which has been known to happen, my sleeping loft will grow into a tangled garden, a BushLake forest; Beans will come for me in my sleep; the curse of Catherine the Great and the bean vine.

But take courage. There are happy endings. For instance: It took less than an hour with flashlight and tweezers to pluck 42 beans from between floorboards. Another for instance? Catherine is put in her place, fourth shelf over, to the left, history section of the Wellington library branch.

And lastly? As I write this testimony following days and nights and watering and questions handled with anticipation while awaiting signs of bean karma and miracles to arise from the dust of failure? Hallelujah! In the sweetness of this early morning, beans happily sprout through soil cover. Sprout everywhere—by the hundreds. We’ve put up a bean pole calling all vines to stretch beyond the limits of clouds. We dance around now having one more reason to believe in possibilities.

But before I go: Just between you and me. Why not drop around to the old place sometime? Say in about 58 days from now, just before first frost and/or the vines disappear into the upper atmosphere? I promise there will be yellow beans in it for you: IF you can hang onto a secret. You see, bean awesome carries huge responsibilities. It can often turn into a trip-and-a-half including small divergences from the truth in order to make magic, if you follow what I’m on about. It’s more than just bean nice.