The smell of bean

The refrigerators were defrosted leaving room for more goat. Barbara and I headed for the goat cheese farm run by the Dutch couple. We sat under the trees at their trees-shaded wooden table drinking a beer. Their two cats and dog waiting to be patted.

“Do you want some legumes too?” the wife asked. We often speak in franglais.

We walked to the back land where a small farm of vegetables stood in weedless dirt and perfectly lined up by catagory. With a knife we hacked Swiss chard and a cabbage that filled one basket. We picked beans, carrots, tomatoes and onions.

The only garden I’ve had in the past three decades has been a small box with herbs on my Swiss balcony (I called it my “back forty”—forty inches not acres), but this French garden brought back the pleasure of our Victory Garden on the Fenway. After work (when the Red Sox weren’t playing because parking was impossible on those nights) we would go over, weed and admire our growing crops. My daughter was still little and we would play games like “I packed a trunk and in it was an apple.”

When I was at Glamorgan University doing my masters in creative writing, Lynne Reese, a poet wrote about the smell of bean on a hot day. The Dutch woman broke off two extra long beans from Indonesian seeds, she said. Barbara and I each inhaled the warm bean smell, broke it in half and bit into it.

Simple foods, simple pleasures.