Paid in Full

I stood watching as she meticulously wrote the check in her careful curved cursive. The amount was in the hundreds. It took extra time to fill in the line where the dollars needed to be written in word form.

This rite of passage, my grandma writing me and my brothers checks for our summer's hard work, was always a childhood highlight.

We walked many hours of beans on those hot summer days. Pulling weeds and chopping errant corn. Our work was replaced by chemicals years later. Removing weeds from fields in the 1970's was the work of humans, typically school children. The devices provided to us to do the job were hoes and thick gloves.

Callouses were a given. Broken blisters in varying degrees of freshness, from wet tender to hardened, were reminders that new ones would soon begin. The transition from the softness of our young hands to those weathered from heat and impact of hoes led to a mesmerizing on our picked-on war wounds.

Grandma didn't do outdoor work. Her domain was the farmhouse. Her hands remained soft and her body plump. Gray hair was teased into the fashionable sixty-year-old-women look of the 1970's. I don't remember my grandma wearing anything other than stretchy dresses in bright patterns with nylon stockings slouching at the ankle. Even her nightwear was a gown, often kept on until she got around to her morning routine that quickly moved to noon-day lunch.

Movement was never fast. A TV show or interesting food dish decorating a magazine cover were distractions. Flitting from one interesting task to another, slow precision and thoughtfulness were hallmarks of Grandma's being. I often wondered if this was why a clean house was not a priority. Her sense of wonder exceeded her sense of urgency.

Grandma was in charge of the money and the kitchen. Anything else that filled her day was up to her. She had a little den off the main family room that she used as an office. It held the stale smell of old paper with layers of dust on untouched books lining the bookshelf. Random boxes and collectible trinkets were scattered. She would squeeze herself into this small space she claimed her own and worked hours on things I never quite understood.

Bills were paid and people were fed. Anything that happened in between was based on her whim and personal sense of prioritization. Neither made any sense to me. But as a young girl, I did appreciate the joy of spontaneity. On days we should have been preparing for weekend company, we would spend hours reading through a doll pattern found on a pile and then search for that perfect swatch of fabric for the desired doll shoes.

When guests were scheduled to arrived, everyone would run around like crazy, frantically filling boxes with the stuff that hadn't been tended to in weeks. We would then stack them away in the privacy of the bedrooms. Our hasty effort would produce a polished shine. The success of our efforts overshadowed our heavy breathing as my perfectly coiffed grandma greeted her guests in the same splendor as though Julia Child was arriving for dinner.

I always thought my grandma's approach to housekeeping was a secret, shared only with my aunts and uncles who had lived in the messiness on the farm. Then a day came when I realized the word got out.

I had a friend, Lora, who lived on a farm nearby my grandparents. She was my 2nd cousin. We were all related somehow in my town. I would occasionally ride my bike to her farm to play. This was extra exhilarating for me since my home was in town. Another perk of spending my summer days on my grandparent's farm.

I once proposed to Lora that she instead come to Grandma's as I knew we had guests the weekend prior and the house would be in better order. Without hesitation, Lora made the statement that exposed my grandma.

"Your grandma sure is nice, but my mom always says that being a good housekeeper is not one of her best traits."

Out of the mouth of babes.

I am quite sure Lora's mom wouldn't have been happy with her daughter sharing her insight. I never repeated her words. That day, Lora and I played in my grandparents' house and had the best time with no worries about the mounting stacks of boxes and stuff. As Lora headed back home, Grandma smiled and thoughtfully told Lora to tell her mother hello.

While the men were out doing the daily chores, Grandma and I would sip tea and meander through our day. We carefully reviewed recipe books, exploring menus like we were feeding royalty.  Grandma would often excuse herself to work on the books, holing up in her dusty den for hours while working on 'her paperwork'.

Upon her departure, I would inspect the den like Sherlock Holmes, wondering what she was doing in there for hours. I could never solve the mystery. Stacks appeared untouched with nothing of interest other than a longer curling adding machine tape.

The only time I was allowed to join her in the den was when she wrote my check for bean walking for the summer.

The crew of bean walkers, led by my farming uncles, included me and my two brothers and others recruited to do the job. We had three fields to cover. In the prime of the summer, with long days of sunlight resulting in high bean and weed growth, we would walk three times a day; morning, afternoon and evening. Nights were my favorite because there was a known end. Darkness.

Carefully following the progression of the evening sunset, I measured the time remaining in our third daily outing to the field with my ten-year-old fingers. I would hold my tanned hand a few inches from my eye and measure the gap, pinching finger to thumb from ground to sun until edges of my blisters completely disappeared from either the lack of light or finger gap remaining.

To this day I still prefer sunset to sunrise. The finality of the night is thrilling.

As the days got shorter and the beans taller, we would reduce our days to two-a-days and then finally one as we focused on re-work on dirtier parts of fields. Then there was the glorious day of getting paid.

The other workers would get paid first. Grandma would spend more time than usual burrowed in the den, adding the ledgers of hours by day, by week, and then to a grand total. My uncles would hand out the checks to everyone but me and my brothers. We were allowed to go to her den, one by one, as she wrote our checks. I was the youngest and last to watch the check-writing ceremony.

With the adding machine humming along to the diligent movement of her fingers, she would always run each series of numbers over again to check her work. I mentally questioned whether an error was even possible given the rate of speed she carefully applied the key strokes. Next her hand went from adding machine to the big book of green two-part checks. I knew I would soon be in the money.

As the days got shorter, an excitement began with the talk of a new approaching school year. There would also be an end-of-summer shopping trip to the city where my brothers and I would be allowed to buy one frivolous item of our choice. This varied from toys to model airplanes. Whatever we indulged, under $15, we could buy. The rest went into our savings accounts. I knew I would soon become fat and happy.

I watched Grandma write my name on the check. Slowly. Carefully. She wrote my full name in her perfect cursive. When writing the seemingly enormous number owed to me, she would emphasize the cross of a 't' and placement of a necessary horizontal line. She was always professional with the time in her den, as this was a business transaction, not to be taken lightly. Her soft hands set the tone of the room and her pace never changed with the task in front of her.

Beaming with excitement, I could now envision the tanned blonde Dusty Barbie doll I had picked out from an outdated JC Penny's catalog. I made up my mind that this would be my purchase from my summer. loot

With Grandma still writing my check, my thoughts jumped to my soft and round grandma. More proper than affectionate, her presence and kind way had always felt like a gentle hug as she and I meandered through the lightness of our summer days together.

I was no longer aching for the sun to set.

She carefully ripped the check along its perforated straight line. My payment was presented to me with a warm smile.

I thanked Grandma, but didn't leave. I stayed in the den watching the finality of our summer close as she boldly wrote on the remaining check stub in perfectly capitalized letters.

PAID IN FULL

The Beanwalkers
Me and my brothers in the front
Aunt, parents, uncles in the back