Love and the Other Half of The Bean

  ***I have chosen not to post pictures to enhance this post. I do not want it to take away from the text. I wrote this a year or so ago for a writing competition on Valentine's Day. To me, Frank and Sarah Channell do not need "enhancements." Their life said as much. They lived for the Lord. They lived their life with the love Hallmark movies are made of.***
    
        This isn’t your typical love story. It’s certainly not one that would normally fit Valentine’s Day, but it does happen to be one of the few times in my life I was able to see true love with the greatest clarity. No, not the mushy sort of emotion that reveals itself in hugs and kisses, but something much more. It’s when love comes from some place deeper than the heart. A love like this can only be digested by the soul because it’s a love that only Jesus can give, and it’s only through His leading that it can be given to someone else.
           

           Midsummer, 1986. I was ten years old, and my father had been laid off from his job a few months earlier…again. He worked various jobs throughout my childhood, and our family economy usually reflected the status of his employment. We never had much anyway, but during these times of joblessness it was all my parents could do to put food on the table. And because our garden was about done producing for the year the prospect of going hungry was very real and present. That thought had my young mind thinking of the Channell family.

          Frank and Sarah Channell were the sort of folks that some people feel sorry for. They had nothing, materially speaking, and it seemed that their lot in life was one of perpetual struggle. Like us, they were poor. In fact, they were the only family I knew that were poorer than us. Their home was made of pine logs, recycled tin, and tar covered cardboard used to insulate frozen goods during transport. Their rough finished concrete floors were covered with some used carpet remnants from a church member who owned a carpet store, and their bathroom was nothing more than an inside room with plumbing that ran to an old outhouse. I felt sorry for them even though they were our closest friends, and our families spent a lot of time together.

          I’m not sure I can remember a time in my life when the Channell family wasn’t there. Frank and Sarah had two daughters that were around the same age as my brother Jeff and me, and they attended the same church we did. My earliest memories are of our families’ killing chickens, cutting wood, and canning vegetables together. Their daughters, Tracy and Corry, were around our same age, and they seemed to understand, as we did, that life for us was not the same as other children in our church. We seemed isolated together on an island of poverty that lacked a map for escape. We were stuck…but we were stuck together, and our mothers seemed to be the caretakers of the rich love our two poor families shared.

          I also don’t remember the first time I heard my mother or Mrs.Sarah talk about the “other half of the bean,” but it was always in our family’s lexicon. As poor folks with nothing, our mothers would say to each other, “If I was down to my last bean, I’d give half to you.” It likely started as a joke between the two of them, because neither of our families went hungry. Mr. Frank and Mrs. Sarah always cultivated a huge garden, and it complimented our own small plot of fruits and vegetables. In the Summer months we seemed to live at each other’s house picking and canning all that the Lord gave us through our labor. Nothing was easy, but we never had less than we needed. This time, however, was different.

          I remember going to the grocery store one Friday evening that summer when things were at their worst. The tension was palpable. There was no money. What little we had bought that day, sugar, flour, and few pounds of ground beef, filled only two bags where we usually pushed a full cart to the car. The four of us walked to the car in silence, and the two-mile drive home was equally as quiet. None of us seemed to know what to say. Words have never filled an empty cupboard.

          As soon as we pulled into our driveway my brother and I grabbed our baseball and gloves from the carport and started to run towards the back yard. There were a few minutes of daylight left, and that was more than enough time for us to throw the ball a little; baseball for us was an escape from the dark clouds of poverty. Before we reached the back of the house, however, we heard a sound that stopped both of us in our tracks. A scream…a mournful wail that pierced through the walls of our home and into our ears. My momma’s voice! Both of us started running.

          Bub and I sprinted back to the front of the house. There we saw our father standing just outside the open kitchen door. His face was ashen, and he slowly shook his head from side to side as tears welled his soft brown eyes. In front him was our mother, collapsed on the kitchen floor with her head in her hands, sobbing. The wailing was now replaced by indistinguishable words, broken by emotion. In front of her, covering every inch of our kitchen floor, were paper grocery bags; filled to the top with more food than we would have normally bought in two weeks. In her hands, a small piece of paper with one sentence faintly scribbled down. “Here’s your half of the bean.”

            Folks, our society needs more families like this. We need mothers and daddys who are willing to put pride aside and love each other through our hardships. I will always hold our female counterparts, Tracy and Corry with the highest regard. They continue, as me and Bub do, to show the love for family that our mothers created. We need more of this today. We need to see the love of Jesus in each other as we continue to search for our half of the bean.