pass it on

today Shisha and I were busy with the french beans - the chickens have sat on the bushes so I wasn't aware quite how many beans we had but we picked over 3kgs. Some for tea, some to freeze*. Shisha was busy with her words of wisdom while we were topping and tailing under the sunshade in the garden. I was thinking about how I used to sit with my sister and my mother topping and tailing many years ago and how my mother would tell me about how she had sat with her mother doing the same...and how her mother had sat with her mother....
At which point, Aïsha chimed in with her own thoughts "it's a good job you're showing me how to do this Elli, because one day I'll have to show my children too" and I pictured the generations of women, in each direction past and future, busy chatting and topping and tailing beans in the shade of a hot day.
Things like that make life seem right. And that's a great thing right now after having spent a few months having our family taken apart by professionals and having to analyse everything - in the end, they agreed with us, that we are 'good enough' parents with children who need some extra help but the process has had us in tears, arguing, convinced we do everything wrong, despairing and in the end, it told us nothing and gave us nothing that we didn't have anyway.
Topping and tailing beans with my girl is like a drop of balsalm on an aching wound. We just have to do enough of such things and the rest won't seem so hard.

*another bit of Shisha wisdom - we'll freeze them and eat them in the winter, we'll be like mice storing food up for the cold days. She's such a clever 6 year old :-)