Snap! Snap! Snap! Snap!

The other day I was driving to work and noticed Linda Schaub and Katie Baines on Katie's front porch and it looked like they were up to something. So I, feeling the need to make sure they weren't involved in something dangerous (plus, sometimes I'm just plain nosy), I stopped to see what they were doing.

They were snapping green beans.

"Snapping" is a technical term. It means to break freshly picked green beans into smaller pieces so when you eat them you don't have to slurp them into your mouth like spaghetti. There's nothing more un-mannerly than sitting there eating dinner with a half-chewed whole green bean hanging out of your mouth. That's why we break 'em up.

Anyway, there they were, just a snapping and a chatting, and a laughing and a knee-slapping and having a good old time.

This used to be your typical green bean preparation procedure. They were bean-snapping just the way my momma and grandmas used to do it way back yonder in the day before everything we ate came store-bought.

It got me to reminiscing about spending time at my grandma's house when I was a kid.

For example, we used to just about fight to see who would get the privilege of keeping the water buckets that were kept on the table near the kitchen door filled up. Believe it or not y'all but there was a time when houses didn't have running water and if you had to avail yourself of the bathroom facilities, well, they were located out back in a little wooden shack, the one with the mail order catalog hanging from a nail on the wall. There were plenty of ways to tell the rich folks from the poor folks back in those days but one of the ways is that the rich folks had them 2-seater outhouses.

As for keeping those buckets filled, the water well at grandma's house had a torpedo-shaped shiny metal thing maybe three or four feet long that was attached by a rope to a hand-cranked wooden spool. You would lower the torpedo and after it filled with water, you would crank it up, then swing it over to the side and place it over a bucket and pull a trigger at the rope end that opened the bottom of the torpedo and allowed the water to rush out into the bucket. That was high-tech stuff back then, way better than X Box or Nintendo, and we kids considered it great fun to be the one who got to pull that "water trigger." Sometimes we'd draw water when we didn't even need water just to get to play with the torpedo thing.

Grandma used to sit on her front porch with her apron full of green beans and a big metal dishpan on the floor and she would snap those green beans and toss them in the pan and we'd sit there with our legs dangling off the front porch and watch her. Sometimes she'd get to snapping and tossing those beans so fast, it would sound like firecrackers. Snap! Snap! Snap! Snap!

That image and that sound are forever etched in my memory.

Grandma's house had a creek that ran in front of it and a little footbridge that crossed over it to the steep hill on the other side where a well-trodden path led to the dirt road at the top. We spent a lot of time wading in that creek, catching crawdads and seining for minnows. We spent many a summer day with our britches legs rolled up playing in that creek and dodging the occasional snake.

Grandma used to tell us some tall tales on that porch while we sat there listening and she'd just grin and wink and try to convince us that all of them were true, even though we knew better. She knew how to entertain us young 'uns.

She'd say, "One of these days, y'all are going to look back and remember these stories and smile."

How'd she know that?

Klonie Jordan (editor@gaffneyledger.com) is executive editor of The Gaffney Ledger.