08/09/2025
When my sister was in 5th grade and I was in 9th, we were both homeschooled. Her science curriculum had one of those projects where you take a bean and put it in a jar with a wet paper towel to make it sprout. So she did that, and then we had this sprouted bean with a root and a leaf coming out of it, and we thought—well it seems kind of a shame at this point to just throw it out. So we went ahead and put it in a pot with some dirt to see what it would do.
Well, this project had come fairly early in the school year, which means we were heading right into winter. We lived far enough from the equator that there really was not going to be a whole lot of sun. But we were homeschooled, so we were home all day and able to do our very best by the plant, which mostly meant religiously checking in on it and scooching it across the floor all day so it stayed in the sun.
The poor thing still struggled, but it did grow, slowly. It made a slender vine with a total of maybe seven leaves. Then a single flower. Then a tiny beanpod that eventually grew big enough to show that it held one single bean. The poor vine poured every bit of the meager amount of energy that we were able to give it into its singular offspring, and then died.
A few months later when spring came, we planted the only child out in our backyard. It yielded 54 little copies of itself. We thought that the grandmother bean would have been proud to know that her herculean effort in the face of adversity did pay off in the end.