the love of numbers can get a person in trouble

i love numbers. always have, always will. and it has gotten me into trouble on more than one occasion.

i had fresh green beans from Indiana when my folks were here this summer. and it got me thinking about how sometimes a person should keep her ever lovin' mouth shut when it comes to number crunching and "canning."

a group of women at our first church asked me to come and spend an afternoon "canning beans" with them. i was excited but massively unprepared for what i walking into.

"canning beans" meant
picking the beans - from the actual bean plant nestled in the dirt of the garden (and there are bugs in that there garden - more than you would suspect). (side road - and may i just point out that my dad's vegetable garden was big - this farm wife's vegetable garden was the size of Rhode Island.)

washing the beans we just picked off that bean plant nestled in the dirt of that bug infested garden (and yes, i am aware that some of those bugs are really a valuable part of the ecosystem that is a garden).

snapping the beans - and yes, there IS a CORRECT way to SNAP those beans we just picked off that bean plant nestled in the dirt. . . and size does matter here in the world of snapping beans. . . i was surprised to know there was a canning standard as well as personal preference.

filling the "canning jars" with the beans that we had just picked off those bean plants. . . and don't kid yourself here, there are some steps involved in preparing the "canning jars" that i was not privy to, but was told they are important to the process.

adding boiling water to the "canning jars" filled with green beans from the bean plant nestled in the garden. . .

cooking those beans in the "canning jars" placed in a scary, hissing pressure cooker pot. ( i think that the hissing sound could end up being a comforting sound, if exposed to it enough times and if you could associate the hiss with the great taste of home canned green beans.)

you can see where i'm going with this, right? my mind wandered a bit and i stated thinking about. . .
x = number of women involved
y = number of hours spent in process
x times y times $ (minimum wage) divided by the number of quarts "put up" - canning speak for "canned" - gives us "z", cost per quart.
cost per quart against sale price of store bought, generic, canned green beans.
sale price of store bought, generic, canned green beans are cheaper (obviously, i did not take quality or taste into consideration).

and i, of course, pointed this out - pretty much out loud to the group of lovely women - completely missing the point of spending an afternoon canning green beans with friends.

spending time with friends - priceless.

spending time with friends in the great outdoors, picking vine-ripened vegetables out of one of the participants very own "Rhode Island big" vegetable garden - priceless.

spending time with friends in the great indoors, snapping and canning those vegetables while sharing bits of each others lives - priceless.

spending time with friends knowing that during the winter each of you will be sharing a bit of that summer's afternoon with her family over a Sunday dinner of pot roast, mashed potatoes and gravy, and home baked dessert to follow - priceless.

i guess what i'm trying to say is. . . if you are ever invited to an afternoon of canning. . . the dirt, the bugs, the beans, the hissing pot, the friendship, the comraderie, and the little bit summer you just captured in that canning jar. . .

don't "do the math" - just enjoy the moment.

and if you do "do the math". . . for heaven's sake, keep it to yourself!