A lunchtime anecdote...

The sun has finally returned to Wuhan, making me willing to venture to the market for fresh veggies to steam in my new-used rice cooker (ahhhh--sing for joy, owners of rice cookers!! Perfect rice every time!!). After class I browsed through the eggplant, the onions, the cabbage, the plethora of unknown veggies that I'm not sure even have an English name...finally settling on some green snap beans and carrots and cauliflower.

Up in the kitchen with the window open and Patty Griffin playing on iTunes, I peeled my carrots and broke apart my cauliflower etc...then commenced mindlessly and rhythmically cleaning the beans, snapping off the ends and peeling the string the runs down the bean off in one smooth motion. Snap....zzzip. Snap....zzzip. Snap...zzzip. Snap...zzzip.

Until I suddenly dropped a bean and had to ask myself....What the heck am I doing???

I've never prepared fresh green beans in my life. My mother didn't when we were growing up (she may have wanted to--but we were true American kids--"We want our canned goods, dammit! Bring on the LaSeure party peas!! Where's my Jolly Green Giant!")

Where, I want to know, did I learn how to snap green beans and peel off the string???? From whence did this knowledge come??? Am I even supposed to do it?

The thing is...it just feels sooo right! I somehow...deep within myself...feel sure that this is what I should to do. It's innate...it's there buried in the stuff of my primordial being...the same force that causes my lips to smile when happy, the same force that knows to put one foot in front of another....that same force somehow knows that before cooking green beans, the stalky end needs to be snapped off and the stringy thing zipped out.

Or maybe this knowledge is stored away in a repressed memory from my Southern childhood. I sometimes see flashes in my dreams of an old woman with green beans held in a kitchen towel laying across her lap. I can't tell if she was a real person in my past or if she's another movie image that carries familiar enough emotions that I accidentally claim it as my own experience. She always appears after the memories of clambering with dad's old t-shirts as cleaning rags and a bottle of windex through the back of the stationwagon on our car-wash days, feeling sticky and grubby and with knees sore from squatting to clean the tires...

Or maybe I'm totally wrong and mom did fix green beans that way for a long time before giving in to our demands for canned-only nutrition. ...

There's also the strong possibility that I'm clueless and the preparation of fresh grean beans has nothing to do with a snap or a zip. It could be that I'm throwing out the most valuable part of the whole thing--making my attempts at a healthy lunch all in vane.

But I have a feeling that I did the right thing.

Laugh at me if you will, you mothers of the South, you health-foodies who have never touched an aluminum can, you Food-Network connoisseurs and you Top Chef wannabees! My spirit cannot be dampened! I feel triumphant, I feel righteous. Today, my subconsious prepared my lunch.

So, yes....Laugh. But then ask yourself: What does your subconsious ever do for you?

And then tell me what I'm really supposed to do with these green beans. Because I have no clue!