MindSpinner

On Tuesday I planted trees, three little apple trees, an Enterprise, an Arkansas Black, and a Williams Pride. These are the last trees I will plant, for I’m running out of room on my half acre. In fact, I would have to move some things around just to situate them. The crabapples I planted three years ago had their bark mostly stripped off by a deer, and at least one was clearly just about ready to give up. That one could go. I dug it up and planted a tree in its place. The other has fared a little better, and I like its mostly burgundy foliage, but really, one of the little apple trees needed to be where it stood. The burgundy crabapple could go farther toward the back of the lot, near the woods, and perhaps it would survive. The trunk is badly damaged, but I’ve let a sucker grow tall, swathed in burgundy leaves at the top and green ones further down, and my plan is to saw off the original tree and let the sucker grow to replace it.

I fetched my shovel. Getting a tree out of the ground that has been three years in the ground is not a small endeavor, but it is not as hard as I imagined it would be. I stopped short when I saw the spider.

She was exactly the sort of spider that terrified me when I was a little girl; she was nearly three inches long, black and yellow, with a smart gray velvet vest and black evening gloves. She’d woven her elaborate web from the trunk of the tree to the ground, and there she sat, guarding her tree, in all her eight-legged magnificence.

I took the shovel and explained to her that I had to move the tree. (I talk to creatures, being somewhat short of people.) I tore at her web with the shovel, being careful not to hurt her. I didn’t want to kill her. I didn’t want to tear her web - I know what hard work it is to make a home - but the apple tree had to be planted, and the crabapple had to move. She scuttled with alarming speed up onto the tree. She was clearly devoted to the tree and would not abandon it, whatever came.

What came was a lot of digging and heaving and hoing. She managed to hang on. Keeping a eye on her whereabouts, I gingerly moved her, tree and all, and planted her tree once again. I decided to wait until spring to saw off the original trunk. Planting done and tree quakes over, she hung quite still, as if traumatized.

I wonder what she will do in winter. Today it is suddenly cold, about 35 degrees out. I’ll mulch the trees; perhaps she can burrow into the hardwood mulch and keep warm.

Last night was made all of rain, thunder, and lightning that spidered white across half the sky. The homecoming game ended abruptly in the first half, when a sudden, long-fingered fist of light opened and ripped from east to west, then closed back into the dark with a ponderous roll of thunder. A night of a thousand daybreaks ensued. At 2:30 in the morning I pulled a pillow over my eyes.

Outside this morning, when the rain abated for an hour, the water garden, the dog bowls, and a garden bucket all brimmed with water. I headed out with a blue wire basket to pick yellow beans.

If yellow beans have a name other than yellow beans, I do not know what it is. If they are traditionally grown outside of the confines of a single Georgia mountain valley, I do not know where that is. The seed has been passed down for generations in my family, and now that my mother, at 77, can no longer raise a garden, and my aunt and uncle are likewise past the task, I don’t know whether anyone else besides me is growing them at all, though I hope so. The mountain valley, like the area where I live now, lies in Zone 6, so I have long had hopes of growing yellow beans. Until this year, I had not had much success. The summers here are hotter, and the soil is different. Last year’s spindly vines produced only a handful of beans. I left them where they grew. Over winter, they dried and fell into the soil, and early last summer, the strongest of them grew into three volunteer bean plants. I worked organic matter into the soil around them, hoping to make them happier with their new home.

For months I succeeded only in growing only lush green vines (the soil now being too rich) that wended their way over an arbor and into the blackberries, the grapes, and a nearby rose. Finally, in early fall, the vines began to bloom, and shortly thereafter, about three weekends ago, I began to pick yellow beans.

Yellow beans do not taste like green beans or any other sort of bean I’ve ever eaten. They are not a wax bean. I want to say they have a nutty flavor, but that’s not accurate enough to be helpful. (You won’t know whether you like them until you’ve eaten them - I like them better than any sort of green bean.) The beans themselves are a dusky purple gray, and the hulls, when mature, change from a soft green to yellow and offer a hint of texture on the tongue. The hulls are flatter than a green bean hull, which is round like a pencil, and the shape of the oval bean within is more visibly pronounced. The vines like to grow tall and then stretch out horizontally for light. Where they find their light, they make their beans. Next year I will build them an arbor. At home, my mother trained them up stalks of field corn, as her grandmother and great grandmother did, in the Cherokee way, but I’m not planning on field corn since I can’t use it for animal feed.

I would not have these beans lost to the world or to my garden or to my table. I would no more give up the growing of them than I would dash my great great grandmother’s blue milk pitcher to pieces on the floor. They are heritage. They link my fingers that plant and break and prepare them to the fingers of my foremothers, breaking the same beans with the same quick, practiced motion. I can see in my hands the hands of stern-faced women I’ve known only from faded photographs, seated in hand-caned chairs in front of an open cabin door.

I’m going downstairs to have some of them for lunch.

I kissed summer vacation goodbye last Monday and attended faculty-wide literacy training all week, conducted by truly capable grant partners from the City by the River. I am excited about our faculty’s positive response and by how our classrooms will be transformed over the course of the four-year grant.

Writing letters (the old fashioned kind, with stamps) to Catapult Kid is keeping me busy, too. I try to track down and print out news articles I think he’ll be interested in and enclose those along with a short note or a long one, depending on the news or lack thereof. He’s supposed to be able to call this weekend - 2.5 minutes per parent. We’ll just have a chance to hear each other’s voices.

Thank goodness we’ll have the chance to hear each other’s voices.

Yesterday, I picked blackberries from the kitchen garden and embarked on the adventure of making jam. I have never made jam before, though I remember my mother doing this. I’d help with peeling apples or peaches, but not so much with the process. Such big pots. So much steam. And afterward, 18 small jars filled with blackberry essence of July, suitable for consumption in January (or this morning, on a waffle). I started a little after 9:00 p.m. and finished by midnight. My favorite part is taking the jars out of the canner to cool and hearing the little pop that says the jars sealed properly. I have a child’s happiness at learning a new thing, never outgrew it.

I first grew Illini Blackberries years ago, accepting, when I ordered the plants from Miller Nurseries, the recommendation of the woman I spoke to on the phone. Today, as I reached gingerly through thorny briars for berries the size of a man’s thumb, catching my shirt here, getting stuck there, and occasionally squealing because I’d impaled a finger, I thought wistfully of Chester Thornfree and other thornless varieties. I questioned whether eating berries with “wild blackberry flavor” is really worth being covered with little scratches.

Though the berries are just now getting ripe and there will be many, many more to pick next week, we had enough for a cobbler. I’ve just eaten a small bowlful, hot from the oven, and I’d just like to say, as I savor the last tart-sweet, intensely blackberry bite, that the woman on the phone was a genius, and the thorns ever so worth it.