Beans

No one could make pinto beans like Mema. There are experiences in every person's life that are so ordinary and often that we don't make much of them until years later when we realize how they fit into the backdrop of our lives. Mema made great beans. Often. I could smell them cooking when I opened the front door after my long walk home from the bus stop. That's when I was older and didn't get home from school until late in the afternoon. During my grade school years, I was already home from school when Mema would take down the big plastic jar full of pinto beans. The splash of beans on the kitchen counter was my cue to come watch her sort out the good beans from the bad ones and occasional rocks. (I was always perplexed by the rocks.) She would flatten out a palm-sized amount of beans, take a look at them, separate out any losers, then cup her hand behind them and slide them off the counter into the big plastic bowl below. The repeated CRASH! of her progress invigorated me. I don't think I realized at the time how exciting it was, but it seems to be something of a fond memory for me now.

There are quite a few things that I had always done the way Mema did them, just because that's the only way I had ever known, and I hadn't given it much thought. (Mema knew everything, after all...why question her methods?) And there are also quite a few practices I have reevaluated and altered over the last nine years of life on my own. So the other day I was making beans, and I decided to try a different way of sorting them (I think my kitchen counter wasn't clean at the moment and I was too hurried to clean it or something). I can't even remember now how I was doing it, as I quickly saw the genius of Mema's method and rectified the situation. I never realized until that day the inherent satisfaction of the CRASH!...CRASH!...CRASH! of progress, Mema style. Oh how I miss her, but she is within me.