Beans, beans, the more you eat, the better you feel

My family has a small plot of their own land high up on the mountainside. The trail to get there is long, uphill, treacherously slick with mud and winds it´s way through coffee tree jungles for a half hour´s walk. I went with the eldest brother and his friend yesterday to pick beans early in the morning. Once we were there, we ducked right into the corn and beans, and brush to pluck the red bean plants from the soft soil. It´s easy, but fighting your way past the weeds, and spotting disguised bean plants among the bush, is the real challenge.

Pack them in bunches in your hand, holding by the upturned roots, and dive in again - this for a half hour until we had a massive pile accumulated off to the side, under the banana trees. There, Mario unfolded a woven sack and we set about plucking the pods off of the plants. This took awhile, so we sat down and shot the breeze all morning while we worked. Like singing while you work, it can really help you forget you´re even working in the first place. And suddenly, the work was done, and we had a giant sack packed with the pods.

How Manuel got that sack down the steep hill, perched upon his shoulders, without slipping in that muck is a mystery to me. I wiped out at least a half dozen times until the land flattened out, and I carried the bag the remaining two-thirds of the way home. From there, anybody sitting around the house is usually involved in stripping the ripe red beans from the pods while watching TV, or talking, or any number of idle things.

And then, they´re ready to be cooked and eaten. Beans are one of my favorite things in the world to eat, washed down with a corn tortilla. They´re the staff of life here and you really have to bust your butt getting them down from the hills into your cookpot. Sure enough, we had beans with dinner that night and they never tasted so good!