Every summer, Mom shipped me off to Clemmons, NC to spend a week with my Brewer relatives. Several times, they put me on a Greyhound bus and shoved me off solo, sometimes seated next to a soldier on leave. I’d spend a couple nights with Aunt Lena, a night or two with my cousin, Bob, and several nights with my cousin Steve. Steve’s dad, Uncle Bud, had married my father’s sister, Aunt Mary. Mary and James were the youngest in the clan of 9, Grandma Brewer’s children. Of those families, I had 15 first cousins, most older and a few younger.
Steve and I had a grand time playing with tobacco sticks (they made great bows and arrows). We shot our BB guns, played in the Clemmons Mill barn, caught June bugs and hoppy toads, and went to an occasional Carolina League baseball game in nearby Winston Salem.
At each of my stops in Clemmons, the food was unparalleled, but Aunt Mary always outdid herself. Afterall, she had Uncle Bud’s Garden to draw from.
All my Brewer relatives had big gardens with bountiful crops, and they all canned quarts and quarts of vegetables. But Uncle Bud’s Garden was special. It was so neat and tidy you could eat a picnic lunch between the rows and not get dirty. He had one of those hand plows that turned the soil and almost daily, after getting off work at Reynold’s Tobacco, Uncle Bud would weed and hoe his garden and pick ripe vegetables. He had corn stalks as high as an elephant’s eye and row after row of black-eyed peas, string beans and beets. He grew potatoes and onions, cantaloupes and squash, carrots, and cucumbers – and especially butter beans.
This week I picked a couple cups of butter beans (Ford Hook Limas) from my modest garden. I had planted two short rows, hoping to get a few “butter beans” for that unbeatable taste and flavor, the taste that reminded me of Uncle Bud’s Garden. Instead of handfuls, Aunt Mary and Uncle Bud gathered bushels of the tastiest legumes on this planet. She served them fresh, and she also canned the beans for the winter.
Aunt Mary was a master at homemade chicken pie served with homemade yeast rolls, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, apple sauce, pickled beets, and butter beans.
As many limas as you could put on my plate, that’s how many I could eat. There are very few foods that match the sheer delight of fresh Ford Hook Lima beans. I enjoyed the handful or so that I picked this week and fondly remember those wonderful meals with Steve, Aunt Mary and Uncle Bud.