The girls and I have been doing an experiment planting lima beans in plastic cups on the countertop. I like watching the beans burst from the dirt.
The other day I enjoyed looking at this cup, where three different stages can be seen. Here one sprout has its first true leaves, while another one is beginning to grow, and the third is still pushing up beneath the soil.
Here see the soil that the sprout is pushing up and out. The first leaves are beginning to unfold.
This isn’t the first time I’ve ever seen a bean plant sprout. I’ve grown them in my garden each summer the past three years. But usually this process takes place outside. I don’t get to see it much, except when I take the time to stop, stoop and look.
There’s something quite enchanting to me right now about watching these beans growing on my kitchen countertop. I’m not sure what it is. Perhaps it is that it is not summer now. It’s winter. It’s a winter in the weather and sometimes it has seemed to be a winter in my soul as well. Yet here are these beans, green stalks growing in graceful and gentle curves, pushing out the dirt, reaching out tender leaves towards the sunlight.
