Showers and Flowers

This merry month of May is crowded with days I celebrate. My brother Charles' birthday on May 16th , and the folks wedding anniversary, May 19th, plus Mother's Day on the 13th. Memorial Day is on the 28th. The Royal wedding took place on the same date as Mom and Dad's anniversary so I celebrated both. I watched the Royal wedding from start to finish, then later in the day, I celebrated with two big helpings of my favorite carrot cake with cream cheese frosting.

The days have been lovely. Flowers blooming in all the flower beds. One bed has several six and seven foot stalks of sunflowers with huge yellow blossoms and one stalk taller that has yet to bloom. It's our first time planting sunflowers so we are surprised at how tall they grow. The famous paintings of sunflowers don't give much of a hint of the height they can reach.

We've picked a few green beans from the plants climbing the string trellis. While chatting about the garden with my son, I told him about my earning money picking green beans when I was around 13 or 14.

During the summer when school was out, the word would circulate thru the neighborhood that anyone interested, could earn a penny a pound picking green beans. A farmer would drive a truck down our street and pick up kids waiting for him, and take them out to the country where the bean fields were. We would get a big gunny sack to put the beans in and drag it along as we picked down the row. We crawled on our knees down the long rows, and when the sack got pretty full, we'd take it to be weighed. We could all see how much the sacks weighed so there was never an argument about how much one earned. One of my girl friends and I competed on how much we could earn during that day. We took sack lunches with us and when noon came the farmer blew a whistle, but it was up to each kid to decide how hard or how long to work. The only thing was, you had to stay until the farmer said it was quitting time, and then he'd take us back to where he'd picked us up. We were all home again by the time supper time rolled around.