Growing up in my section of the Appalachian Mountains, summer always focused on green beans. While we grew many different types of vegetables for our table it was obvious from daily conversations between Mama and Aunt Ruby that green beans were the stellar crop. Day in and day out they did ‘bean-talk,’ covering such topics as types of green beans, best types of manure for fertilizing green beans, best times to harvest different varieties of green beans, preserving green beans by freezer method or by canning method, good insect repellants for green beans, appropriate green bean dishes to take to funeral receptions, managing drought conditions for green beans, and best clothing suitable for picking green beans. The conversations were endless and lasted all summer.

As I reached adolescence these conversations, like so many other adult conversations, became intolerable. I was the only child of four at home; it was just Mama, Daddy, Aunt Ruby and me. Day in and day out they did ‘bean- talk’, saying over and over what they said the day before. How could beans possibly be so worthy of these daily conversations? Who really cared about the answers to these questions? What did any of this have to do with the rest of the world that they knew so little about? I escaped their world of bean dialogue with my collection of 45 rpm records and images of ‘real teens’ who lived in cities where they could shop for exciting clothes, go to movies, have pool parties, and sunbathe on the beach. I knew that the people I was reading about in Seventeen Magazine did not have to listen to conversations about green beans. How could I ever get a boyfriend if my only topic of communication was green beans? And in the typical fashion of teens and adults we were totally disconnected from each other.

Finally I got old enough to escape by going to college only to come home for summer breaks to the same bean conversations; but now I had new focuses, boyfriends, and new questions about my life. I learned how to shut out the ‘bean-talk’ by thinking about a career and new life outside of Appalachia. I reasoned that soon I would be away from all garden talk and could finally create the world I wished to occupy. And I did.

It’s now 43 years later, and I’m surprised to find myself thinking about ‘bean-talk.’ I find it amazing that my brain can return to all these memories fairly quickly and can still visit those conversations as though they were yesterday. If someone were to ask me something only remotely connected to beans I could do at least a 30-minute lecture that would sound identical to what I listened to each day when I was an adolescent. In many ways it would be their conversation, but why? Maybe the answer lies in trying to figure out what value this has for me now. Below is what I’ve concluded.

To take the information I absorbed from Mama and Aunt Ruby and place it in today’s context, I imagine them having a website called BeanTalk.com with the focus being ‘all things green beans.’ It would be something like Martha Stewart’s website complete with a separate link to every topic of green beans they covered, plus links to recipes, products such as green bean aprons, green bean gardening gloves, many varieties of green bean seeds, specialized green bean insect repellants, summer sandals with large GB initials on the top, designer sundresses with cute green beans or bean blossoms on them, green pressure cookers for processing green beans, and customized freezing methods for frozen green beans. There would also be a weekly blog about green beans that duplicates the conversations between Mama and Aunt Ruby. How about that for coming full circle???