Today as I made ready to cook some fresh green beans from my neighbor’s garden, I remembered how meditative this part of a meal is for me. I have been washing and snapping beans since I was knee-high to the grown women in my family, using a step-stool to reach the basin and the sink. In the younger, more hurried days of my youth; speed and agility were the focus of my efforts. Back then, the mountain of beans in the basin was so high. The jars already boiling and jouncing in the canning pot. The goal was to fill an entire shelf row in the pantry against the grey winter winds. But this afternoon; I am older and slower, even if not much wiser. I take a balanced and relaxed stance at the sink. I open one window to increase the volume on the birdsong from out in the trees. I breathe and settle into an easy rhythm of snapping. I focus on each bean as it travels from my left hand, to my right and over into the colander. This one is lumpy with mature beans. This one has faint purple stripes waving along one side. And this very tiny one is joined all along its length to an identical twin. It takes me twenty minutes to snap the small mound for lunch. And in those twenty minutes I am happy, calm and filled with a quiet joy for all I am gifted; the breeze coming through the screen, the smell of green crispness, the call of the chickadees.