Country Mouse Monday: threshing & dreaming

Maybe you know this feeling already: the deep satisfaction of harvesting food you've grown with your own hands and land.

That's a sweet, sweet feeling that for me never gets old.

For me yesterday, harvesting the haricots Tarbais, the holy grail of beans, there was that and there was more.

There was the delight of learning a new word. Dry beans require threshing – getting the beans out of the pods. Cool!

There was also, though, mostly, this sense while sitting there on the patio in the late afternoon sun, with a bowl in my lap and the basket of dried pods in front of me, of continuing an interrupted family tradition of cultivation.

I was my grandmother, and my grandmother was me.

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