snapping beans.

I'm sitting on the floor of my living room, facing a blank TV screen. I've got a big kitchen bowl to my right and a plastic grocery bag full of green beans to my left. I am snapping beans. Pinch one end, then the other, snap the bean into even pieces about two inches long, drop the pieces into the bowl. Pinch, pinch, snap, snap, snap, drop. Each step has a different noise, distinct, yet quiet enough that were the TV on, I wouldn't hear them. As I snap more, a familiar smell comes back. It's not like picking the beans, which has the smell of sweat and close spaces and dirt and broad yellow-green leaves sticking to your t-shirt. And it's not the smell of cooking the beans, which is hot and hungry and buttery. It's a fresh green smell, earthy and homey. They say smell is the sense with the most powerful memory, and as I snap, I think about beans.

A handwritten list on the kitchen table, scrawled in the pre-dawn hours, sometimes with a note below. Chores for summer vacation, from my mother who knew that she didn't make us do enough housework. I dreaded the List. At first it was long, because my sister was there. Sometimes Mama doled out the jobs herself and we each had an assigned column, our names like bylines. Sometimes she left it to us to fight it out who would have to sweep (hard, boring) and who would have to empty the trashcans (easy, quick). Then later, my sister left for college and the list got shorter, sometimes only one hastily written item to make my mother feel better about not making her daughter work harder. The seasons of the summer can be told by the chores, as sometimes we must pick strawberries, then pick blueberries, and then we must snap beans. I hated the garden chores, because I hated all chores on pricinple. I hated picking berries, because our fulfillment of the task was measured by how much we pick, and I ate half my crop. There's no reason I should've hated snapping beans. Snapping beans is a chore done on your butt in front of the weekday game shows. Snapping beans is a chore assigned by a mother who is trying to pad out the List.

A neighborhood swimming pool, sometimes empty and sometimes teeming with live little bodies. Mama doesn't swim, but sits in the shade of the carport. She pays as much attention as any seasoned mother, that is, none at all unless the soundtrack of shrieks changes volume. She brings beans in a kitchen bowl nested inside another bowl. She holds the bowl of beans in her lap and tosses the broken pieces into the empty bowl at her feet. As the hour progresses, the levels of the bowls switch. When we are the only ones there, she snaps and thinks about whatever Mamas think about. When other kids are also taking advantage of the pool, there is a row of Mamas in metal red-checked patio furniture. Some of them have also brought their beans, because everyone we know has a garden. Those who haven't brought their own help, too, and they talk about whatever Mamas talk about.

I am not at the pool, and I am not watching The Price is Right. I'm just sitting on my much-larger butt, snapping beans. I consider putting in a DVD, but decide that I rather like the noises made by bean pieces snapping and then tumbling all over themselves in the bowl. I feel oddly quiet and centered.

I think about whatever Sandras think about.