"That's me on the right." - Diane Parsons
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Welcome
to The Bean Scoop!
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Welcome
to our Fall issue of The Bean Scoop. Since this is my first
trip into the world of editing, this is also the first "editor's
welcome" I've been asked to compose. I confess that I seldom
read editors' introductions because I find them self-indulgent.
Perhaps, I have pondered, they are written for someone snowbound
in a remote cabin for days on end with no other reading material
save one old magazine and a cereal box.
My mind started to hum as I stared at my blank computer screen.
Coffee. Fall. Coffee. Fall. What could I say about that? And
then, suddenly, this very self-indulgent memory came to me,
and, so, read on if you will...
When I was young, my mother's sisters would come to visit us
in September. They each came equipped with an uncle and various
cousins. The women sat in the kitchen around our large wooden
table and my Aunty Pauline would knit sweaters as they talked.
My mother made coffee in a pot on the stove and served it with
cream and brown sugar. The husbands would go off, to the basement,
for a beer. Or out into the yard to look over one of the sailboats
my father always seemed to be building behind the house. That
year my father had covered the entire back yard in a makeshift
clear plastic tarp that extended from our roof to the back fence.
You could look out from the kitchen through the sliding glass
door, over the narrow balcony and see a magical extension of
the house - a humid and strange space that housed a growing
thirty-six foot trimaran.
I remember, once, leaving my noisy cousins in the basement and
sitting amongst the women upstairs where it was warm and fragrant.
The room was moist with steam from the coffee and since the
tarped-in back yard made the kitchen even warmer, my mother
opened the sliding door. The smell of wet grass and late summer
rain sucked into the room. My Aunty Pauline took off her blouse
and sat, knitting, in her sturdy white bra. I sat still and
did not speak. It was enough to listen and let their words and
their warm breath lap up against me.
That's it. If you got this far, and my theory is correct, then
you must be snowbound but at least you have access to a computer.
Therefore, pour yourself a mug of coffee and join us for a brief
sojourn into java culture.
Diane Parsons
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