Let me see that bean

The Bean It began with a bean. Not a special bean. Not an ancient bean. Not a bean blessed by moonlight or stolen from the gods. Just a bean. It was small, brown, slightly wrinkled, and shaped vaguely like a kidney. It had no thoughts, no feelings, no voice, and absolutely no idea what was happening. It sat inside a paper grocery bag between a loaf of bread and a can of tomato soup. The bag was carried into a house on a Tuesday afternoon. The groceries were unpacked. The bread went onto the counter. The soup went into a cabinet. The bean fell out of the bag. Nobody noticed. It landed on the kitchen floor. For three days, it remained there. Shoes passed around it. A chair leg nearly crushed it. Dust gathered in the little crease along its side. Then, on Friday morning, someone swept the floor. The bean was swept beneath the refrigerator. There it stayed. Months passed. The refrigerator hummed. The kitchen changed. A new rug appeared. The walls were painted. The old chair disappeared. A dog moved into the house and occasionally shoved its nose beneath the refrigerator, but never found the bean. Years passed. The bean remained. One summer, the refrigerator broke. Two men arrived to replace it. They pulled the appliance away from the wall. The bean rolled into the sunlight. One of the men noticed it. He nudged it with his boot. "Old bean," he said. Then he swept it into the trash. And that was almost the end. Almost. The trash bag was carried outside and placed beside the road. That evening, it rained. Water seeped through the bag. The bean became wet. It rolled free through a tear in the plastic and came to rest in a patch of dirt beneath the garbage can. Nobody saw. Nobody cared. Winter came. The ground froze. Spring followed. Rain fell. The bean softened. A tiny root emerged. Then another. Days passed. The root pushed downward. Something green pushed upward. The bean split. Half of it remained underground while a thin stem rose into the air. It was not beautiful. It was crooked. A lawn mower clipped it twice. A dog stepped on it. Someone nearly pulled it out while weeding. But it kept growing. By late summer, it was a modest little bean plant. Nothing remarkable. No enormous stalk. No golden leaves. No miraculous harvest. Just a bean plant growing beside a garbage can. One afternoon, a child walking home from school noticed it. She stopped. She looked at the plant. She touched one of its leaves. Then she smiled. She didn't know where it came from. She didn't know how long it had been there. She didn't know that it had once spent years beneath a refrigerator. She didn't know that it had survived a garbage bag, a winter, a lawn mower, and a careless boot. She simply liked the little plant. So she watered it. And the next day, she watered it again. Eventually, small flowers appeared. Then pods. And inside those pods were beans. Ordinary beans. Hundreds of them. In the fall, the child collected them. She took them home. Some became dinner. Some were planted in her garden. And one little bean, brown and slightly wrinkled, fell unnoticed beneath the kitchen table. Nobody saw it. It sat there quietly. Waiting. Not because it had a destiny. Not because the universe had chosen it. Not because anything magical was about to happen. It was just a bean. And sometimes, apparently, that was enough.