The Bean Pot
Everywhere I go, I look for a bean pot like the one my mom kept on top of the fridge. She’d let her sourdough rise overnight in it and on occasion I remember beans soaking. Thankfully it was mostly for the sourdough, as I was never a fan of beans, but when they landed on my plate, I was required to eat them before I was allowed to leave the table for the night. I swallowed them whole - because - well - chewing made them real.
I poked around for years for a similar pot, in antique, thrift and consignment shops - dry on the outside, like a rough chalkboard, glazed on the inside - one who’s lid had survived time.
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Recently our weekend was amuck. Rain happened, camping was cancelled. Our alternate plans of staying by the fire with a book at a friends’ lake cabin up north changed, because, well, the sun came out. Antiquing ensued. Driving back roads filled with color, seeking trails, a clean-ish public restroom - a good cup of coffee, jelly donuts and more antique stores was the result of that sunshine. We drove out of town along winding roads to another town, with car sickness, switching the bad news on the radio to classic rock, pulling over here and there at a scenic outlook.
We were down 0 for 2 on the shops in our GPS that either were closed or no longer existed anymore by the time we had arrived. But backtracking to just a mile from the cabin, we pulled into a shop with brightly colored rocking chairs out front and large car-dealership-like “open” flags scattered across the front.
We walked in and I looked past the hand sanitizer station and up on a high shelf and there it was. A bean pot. With a lid. I was still unsure if it was the right one, it was far away, I did’t have my glasses and suddenly I wondered if it really was a bean pot, technically. The shopkeeper came over when I pointed and tried to say clearly through my mask “May I see that?”.
“That bean pot? Ha. We’ve had it forever.” She climbed a stool and brought it down for me. It was thick with dust and wasn’t priced.
This was it. It was bigger, but it was it. “How much?” I asked. Thinking in my head that I would pay $75 for that - and that I would have to refrain if it were more, imagining it to be more like $150. I would probably even pay THAT.
I waited, helping myself to a pump of expired tequila smelling hand sanitizer, while she looked it up “in the system”.
“Twenty”.
I gulped. “Say it again?”
I am partially deaf and even with my hearing aids wasn’t quite sure - Masks muffle all speaking, everyone sounds like Charlie Brown’s teacher to me these days.
“Twenty Dollars.”
Of course I bought the bean pot - giddily.
She wrapped it carefully, I managed to get it home safely.
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When we were in Junior High, our mom went back to work full time at our private school, and things changed a bit in our house. We had longer days on campus since she worked late in the office. We fended for ourselves part time in the Summer. We had JUNK FOOD in the house, cheese puffs instead of pretzels, Honey Nut Cheerios instead of Grape Nuts, snack bags of Doritos for taking to school instead of carrots and olives, and store bought bread. In our lunchboxes we would occasionally find a special treat. It might have been candy, sometimes stickers for our sticker trading books, flavored lip balm in those little rectangle tins with the sliding lid. And in her true nature, she planned, stocked up, and doled them out over time in our lunches.
I found our mom’s hiding spot for those treats, right there in the bean pot one day. The bean pot was used less then, with less bread baking and less sourdough rising.
I was the one who eventually broke the lid to our mom’s bean pot. It was resting on top of the fridge, just over the lip of the door of the freezer, and when the door of the fridge opened, it fell to its demise. I can still picture it falling and resting shattered on the kitchen floor.
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I know she kept the main vessel, I am not sure what happened to it, because by the time she passed away, exactly 20 months ago, it had disappeared. At the time of this writing, I have a message to my sister asking her if she ended up with it, so I am just not really sure, I hope she has it. If not, Mom likely donated it to a local thrift store, for someone else to claim, lid-less.
I now have my own bean pot. It won’t have stories that go back to when my kids were little - and they’ve outgrown treats in their lunchboxes - but I am just heading down to the kitchen get some sourdough rising.