The Greenbean Club

As an inaugural member of the Greenbean Club, you were entitled to three things: full voting privileges, access to the tree house, and a plate full of greenbeans. For years, I resisted joining--who wanted to be in a club devoted to greenbeans?--it was my tree house too, and I didn't even like greenbeans. In later years I relented and claimed membership (something about nutrients and also the way in which butter can enhance the flavor of any vegetable) and was voted to be the Club historian.

Can you imagine, our summertime house, filled with children and sunshine, sisters and brothers and cousins and friends, and light breezes blowing lace curtains through the windows? On warm nights we slept in crisp light sheets, and everyone had a pet cricket that slept in a spare shoe beneath our beds, warding off mischievous spirits and serenading us with the ancient lullaby of the arthropoda.

In the mornings, the world upside down as the sun drifted to the North, we linked arms and marched down the lane, little Peter Pans stomping on our own shadows and never growing old, singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic as loudly as our voices could go.

At the end of the road, there is an old family cemetery. It is not our family's, but we improvise bouquets from the wildflowers in the ditch and solemnly leave them in front of the headstones that, by this time, have nearly sunken into the ground. We follow the age worn engravings with our fingers; we make out the dates, but not the names. In the still air that remains after our songs fade away, in a little patch of grass surrounded by corn fields on three sides, we are pensive, with the particular depth of children realizing they are within distance of a truth.

Should we be sad in that cemetery, knowing that each winter passing wears the marble and memories further away? We aren’t. Should we worry of our own mortality, the fleeting nature of our own legacies? We don’t. It is difficult to fathom one hundred years ago or one hundred years to live and impossible to grasp the proximity of years engraved into the stone. But somehow we know that the morning is for the living and that the lark on the fence will carry our songs along on the wind long after we are gone; we pay a semblance of respects, and we remember the other certainties of the world. These are the oaths of the Greenbean Club: that everything is better in butter, that pancakes should always look like Mickey Mouse, that animals can talk, and that, when faced with the options of hunt or gather, choose gather, between fight or flight, always flight!

At the end of Blaine Road, we break our solitary thoughtfulness and squint our eyes at the majesty before us: our own yellow brick road leading through glistening foliage and trumpeting morning glories, back to our own emerald colored, tree filled yard. We are gatherers, so we stop when we see blackberries growing along the fence line, staining our fingers and lips. "Always flight!" our hearts call and so we soar home, sending flocks of sparrows to the sky as we race by their perches on the telephone wires.

We arrive breathless at the kitchen table; glasses, with flowers painted on the sides, are filled with orange juice; they catch the morning sun and glow on the table. While we indulge in our pancakes, the birds in the birch and on the telephone wires and the crickets in our shoes and on the cool green basement steps join together in the morning chorus. "Glory Glory Alleluia!"