Acres of Ability

Kyra's Garden: No Swearing Required My first job, and one of my first memories, was “walking beans”. From the middle of June, until the soybeans grew into a matted mass, my mom and my sisters and my brother, along with most other Midwestern farm kids, began each morning by 6am walking up and down miles of rows of soybean fields, pulling each and every weed. By the root. (It didn’t count if you didn’t get the root.) We ended by noon or so, before it got too hot. Back at home, the five of us kids would jostle for a bit of cool from the window air conditioner in the dining room, waiting for our turn in the bathroom, while mom cooked us all lunch, refilled our milk jugs with water to freeze for the next day’s work, washed our stinking clothes, and helped Dad into his El Camino to inspect our work.  (My dad had mobility issues due to MS. But that’s another story.) I could go on and on about walking beans, the ankle-spraining cement-hard clods of mud, and the bugs, and the s