The beans came in a paper sack, cool on the shaded side, warm where the sack had ridden on the seat. I set a bowl in my lap and spread yesterday’s paper on the floor and started.
A bean breaks at the stem first. You bend it until the skin gives, and it gives all at once. A small green crack, wet and clean. There is no easing into it. The bean is whole and then it is two things.
Then the string, if the bean is old-fashioned enough to have one. You pull it down the seam and it lifts away like a basting thread. Most of these had none. Bred out of them, somewhere, by someone deciding the string was a flaw. I pulled anyway, out of habit, and felt the seam refuse me. My thumb kept looking for work that was no longer there.
Snap the head. Snap the tail. Two breaks to a bean, three if it had grown greedy. The trimmed ends went to the newspaper, flicked off the thumbnail one at a time, until they made a small pale heap of nothing anyone wanted.
The rhythm takes over before you notice. Bend, crack, flick. A lapful becomes a bowlful the way an afternoon becomes evening — not at any moment you could name.
The bowl filled with blunt green segments, all business now, ready for the pot. The heap on the newspaper was the other harvest. Stem ends and tips, the parts that had held the bean to the plant and the parts that had reached past it.
I folded the paper around them without counting. They were still damp. They stained through the fold before I reached the bin.