The story below is an excerpt from our November/December 2017 issue. For the rest of this story and more like it subscribe today, log in to read our digital edition or download our FREE iOS app. Thank you!
How to honor your grandmother by confessing to your carelessness.
Joseph Mackareth
Last issue, our fine columnist Molly Dugger Brennan lent her wonderful storytelling talents to talking about the days before air conditioning—days when grandmothers spent far too many of their waking hours “putting up” food for the coming winter.
The column was, as usual, illustrated by Joseph Mackareth, the talented guy who’s been providing such for Molly’s columns since just after she started with us, in January, 2015.
Joseph generally sends us three preliminary sketches to consider for each column, and Molly and I are usually in agreement on which we like. Joseph’s fanciful spirit leads him to send, usually, one that’s pretty literal to a piece of the column, one that’s a little playful, and one that leans toward the fantastic.
For September/October, Joseph focused his illustration topic on the part of the column that goes like this:
I was a clumsy child, so I was forbidden to enter the kitchen while boiling water, glass jars and pressure cookers were stacked everywhere. I got porch duty. A gigantic mixing bowl was put in my lap, and a bushel of string beans would be set down next to me. My instructions were: “Start stringing, and holler when you’re done.”
I’d be out there alone, stringing beans out of what seemed to be a magical basket that kept refilling itself. Sisyphus string beans, I tell you. No matter how much I tried to focus, I didn’t make much of a dent in the mountain of beans. That’s OK. Eventually, Grandma would get too hot in the tiny kitchen and take a break with me on the porch while my mother would continue the production line inside.
Grandma would start stringing beans with me, and I’d find myself trying to match her pace, and lo and behold, the tide turned on the beans.
Two of those sketches, as well as the final, depicted, according to Joseph’s notes, “stringing of the beans.”
And it was not until alert reader Anna Hale of Floyd, Virginia pointed it out to us that either Molly or I caught what Joe had done: beans being literally strung, like popcorn on a string. (Turns out, Joseph confesses with a laugh, that—ah, youth—he Googled stringing of beans and came up empty of the largely last-century practice, and so he went with string.)
I have memories as sharp as Molly’s of being in the backyard at my maternal grandparents’ house in Radford, Virginia, helping my mother and grandmother string the green beans that had been picked out of the garden up on the hill, and now nearly filled a paper grocery bag. And of their gentle admonishing not to break the tip off quite so far down, because I was wasting a bit of the bean as I chucked the string into the little bowl there next to the big one where the strung beans went.
And when I told fellow veteran bean stringer Molly about Anna’s good-natured catch (“Chuckle, chuckle,” she closed her note), she put her tongue in her cheek where it often is and said this: “Let’s just tell that reader it was a visual pun and glad she enjoyed it.”
I suspect if either Molly’s or my grandmother were still around, she’d tell us both, with no hesitation, to “‘fess up right now, young man and young lady!”