When you're growing up, there's no place in your memory like home. But even within that broad context of home, you usually have one or two places that carry more significance than others. For me, that special place of memories is our back porch. The stories that place could tell!
Perhaps the memory that I most often associate with that back porch is that of the innumerable nights we spent there as a family shelling peas, breaking and stringing green beans, shucking and silking corn, or sorting peaches. And we all chipped in to do those jobs. We had to if we expected to eat in the upcoming winter, when Daddy was often unable to lay brick because of bad weather.
Mother would pick the peas early in the morning while it was still cool and if she had had time among her other duties of house and garden. If not, she would pick them after the supper dishes had been cleaned up and before it got dark. She usually had a bushel or two--or maybe she had picked them in large paper grocery bags. We would carry them to the house. If she had used bushel baskets, we would each grab one of the wire handles on either side of the baskets and carry them to the back porch.
Mother would bring out her cooking pots, assign one to each of us, and take one herself. Then she reached into the basket, grabbed a double handful of peas, and dropped them into each of our pots. That's when the serious work began.
We had learned through her instruction to turn each pea pod the right way so that pressure on the back end of the pod with the left thumb popped open the pod. Then the right thumb we slid down into the pod and along the inside, popping each of the peas inside loose, opening the pod along its length, and dropping the peas into the pot with at first tiny, metallic ping! ping! pings! and then, as the pot slowly filled, with no sound at all.
We threw the empty pods into a paper bag between us for discarding later in the compost pile. (Mother and Daddy were green long before it became a fad because they were strong believers in organic gardening, even subscribing to and faithfully studying a magazine called Organic Gardening.
Then we reached for another pea pod and repeated the process. That continued past darkness and long into the night until all the peas had been shelled and our right thumbs were soar, soaked with pea pod juices, and stained green.
But the most memorable thing about those pea-shelling sessions was not the dozens and dozens of quarts or pints of peas we heled Mother can by that exercise but what accompanied those sessions. We talked together as a family. Some talk was serious. Some of it was funny. We sometimes sang silly songs or hymns. And Mother and Daddy sometimes told stories. But whatever we did or talked about, we were bonding as a family, receiving valuable instructions for living life, and learning how to live. We were learning what was really important in life.
We inevitably dropped some peas now and then, and they would go rolling across the concrete sidewalk and porch. Quite often, a toad would find its way onto the porch, drawn to the large number of brown, hard-shelled bugs that were themselves attracted to the yellow porch light. If one of us happened to flip a pea close to the toad, it would often flick out its tongue and capture it, thinking that it was a tasty bug.
My brother once substituted a marble for the pea, and the toad lapped it up. Then my brother touched its backside to make it jump. When it landed, it clinked. Later, deciding that marbles had no taste and caused it stomach pain, the toad regurgitated the marble and went after tastier fare.
Mitzi, our little Spitz, also liked the taste of brown hard-shelled bugs. Daddy would flip them from the back screen door, where they had attached themselves, and Mitzi would catch them midair, crunch on them once or twice, and down the hatch they disappeared. She never tired of that fare and actually looked disappointed whenever Daddy tired of the exercise or ran out of bugs.
I really miss those back-porch nights!