The Bean Belt

I was cutting the ends of green string beans today getting ready for a dinner party of eight. The beans reminded me of the great venture of my parents in their fifties when they moved to BC from the small prairie town where my dad was the railroad station agent.  The rules of the railway were , if you moved to a new province you lost all your seniority for three months, so you had to take jobs from the bottom of the barrel. They had a family of three boys with them and little money saved and income was tight so they lived in a comfortable barn on friend's property in Chilliwack and he bicycled to work at Port Mann, a fair distance,  at 5 am every morning. My mother and my brother Ken worked all day on the bean belt in Chilliwack.
    The month or two after they arrived he was short of cash before payday and he phoned me where I was working in my summer job at Prince Rupert to see if I could send him 15 dollars. I didn't know how to do that. At the end of his shift he rode his bike back to Chilliwack to meet Ken and mother when they finished working on the bean belt. He sat by the outside door to wait for them and found an upturned large oil can to sit on while he waited.
    The foreman of the bean belt came across of him sitting and relaxing in the sun and said to him, " Fella, you are fired. Go now and pick up your time and don't come back."  My dad said to him, " I'm not working here."  He said, " Fella, I already told ya that" !
It wasn't that easy moving to British Columbia.