Jack and the Beanstalk
JACK AND THE BEANSTALK – March 17, 2025 – Three Rivers, Michigan, USA
All the dirt in the clear plastic cup arrived safely at home. Jack Stiles wanted to run with it from the bus stop but he remembered what his second-grade teacher said about walking and using two hands. When he finally held it up for his mom to see, pride and anticipation beamed from the freckles on his chin to the top of his black, still-combed hair.
“We got to take it home. There’s a seed inside,” Jack said, as if he held a cup full of diamonds.
Jack’s mom, Molly, tried to match Jack’s enthusiasm. “Oh wow. What are you supposed to do with it?”
“My teacher said I first had to get it home safe. Then I water it and the bean inside grows into a green plant.”
“Everyone in your class took one home?”
“Uh huh. And there’s a contest to see whose seed grows the tallest. I have to take it back in four weeks.” Jack’s eyes darted around the room. “I need a place to keep it so the bean gets lots of light.”
Molly and Jack tried different spots in the room with south facing windows. Jack liked the low table next to one of the windows and gently placed the cup into a beam of afternoon sunlight. He crouched on his hands and knees, his face a few inches from the enclosed dirt.
“I think it needs a little more water.”
Jack carefully filled a glass from the kitchen sink and dribbled a few drops onto the soil. Then he returned to watching.
“You probably won’t see anything happen right away,” Molly said with an amused smile. “It might take a few days.”
“I don’t know if I can wait that long,” Jack replied, tapping at the cup. He spent the rest of the afternoon and evening returning to the table to check on the seed’s progress. He reluctantly went to bed without spotting any green shoots.
The next morning, Molly had to drag Jack away from his dirt cup to get him to the school bus on time. When he was gone, she began her weekly housecleaning routine, which included vacuuming. As she pushed the vacuum around the short table holding Jack’s cup, she bumped one of the legs. Jack had left the cup near the table’s edge and it toppled onto the carpet below, spilling the dirt.
Molly screamed as the cup fell and immediately worried about the stain it would leave behind. She hurried to scoop some of the dirt back into the cup and then vacuumed up the rest. She still saw a brown spot so she sprayed it with a cleaner meant to be removed by a vacuum once it was dry. After sighing over the accident site, she remembered her son’s beloved seed.
She had not seen anything other than dirt when scooping into the cup. In all likelihood, the seed had disappeared into the vacuum. If nothing began growing in a few days, Jack would be devastated. Molly did not have the time in her schedule for this type of distraction, but she grabbed the cup, got in her car, and raced to Home Depot.
When she reached the store’s gardening center, Molly found a friendly employee watering potted houseplants.
“I’ve got a plant emergency,” Molly explained. “My son is doing a project for school. He planted a seed in this cup but I knocked it over and I think the seed fell out. I need a replacement.” Molly held up the cup.
“What kind of seed was it?” the gardening man asked, inspecting the dirt in the cup.
“I’m not sure. He kept saying “seed” and “bean”. He might not know the difference, but it’s a good bet it was some kind of bean.”
“Beans are popular for school science projects.”
“Can I buy some bean seeds? The fastest growing ones you’ve got?”
The man chuckled. “Sure. I’d recommend Lima Beans.”
He helped Molly choose a packet of ready-to-plant Lima Beans and the smallest available bag of potting soil. She hurried home, added a handful of soil to Jack’s cup, and then pushed one of the Lima Beans below the surface. After adding a few drops of water, she put the cup back on the TV room table, well away from the edge.
“Looks pretty good. I don’t think he’ll notice a difference,” Molly said to herself.
By the time Jack returned from school, the carpet was vacuumed clean and the extra beans and topsoil from Home Depot were buried at the back of a closet. Molly watched nervously as Jack inspected his cup.
“Nothing new yet,” Jack reported.
“Everything looks the same?” Molly asked.
“Uh huh.”
“That’s good. Now just be patient. And try to keep the cup in the middle of the table. You don’t want it to accidently fall off.”
Jack added a few water drops of his own to the cup. He continued watching and caring for it. And then, three days later, he came home from school and screamed.
“It’s alive! I see it. I see green, Mom!”
Jack danced around the room and insisted Molly take pictures of the green sliver rising from the potting soil.
“I think it’s already bigger,” Jack reported an hour later. “Take another picture.”
In the following days, as the plant grew, so did Jack’s attachment to it. He used a ruler to measure its progress, getting his mother’s help to interpret the pesky fractions of an inch. Every morning and night, he wrote down the height in a small notebook and his mom was amazed by his persistence. When it came to new toys and games, he usually lost interest after 48 hours, but somehow the bean plant kept him fascinated.
Four weeks after he first brought the plastic cup home, the bean plant stood a little over nine inches tall. The bean was so tall, the central stem curled at the top and Jack was not sure if he should uncurl it for an official measurement. He was sure, however, that his was the tallest plant in his class and he would win the prize promised by his teacher. His next important task was transporting the cup and plant back to school without any damage. Jack and his mom worried about taking it on the bus, so she arranged to drop him off at school on the day it was due.
Molly watched with tender pride as Jack gingerly held his cup with both hands and shuffled toward the school entrance. She expected to see the same expression on his face when he returned home that afternoon. Instead, he looked miserable and devastated. His eyes were red, as if he had been crying.
“Honey, what’s wrong?” Molly immediately asked.
“I didn’t win,” Jack blubbered. “My plant was the tallest but I didn’t win.”
“Why? What happened?”
Jack was too upset to clearly describe what went on at school. Molly caught bits and pieces about his teacher and other kids’ plants being different and better. As Molly watched Jack suffer through his disappointment, rage burned inside her. Jack had been treated unfairly. She would pay the teacher a visit as soon as possible and set things right.
Molly adjusted her schedule the next day and arrived unannounced to Jack’s school right after noon. She marched to his classroom and found his teacher, Ms. Clementine, eating lunch alone while her students were on the playground. Molly stormed in and caught a glimpse of twenty-five plants and plastic cups lined up on a long table near a window.
“I’m Molly Stiles, Jack’s mom,” she said in a prickly voice. “We talked during the last parent-teacher conference.”
“Yes, I remember. How are you?” Ms. Clementine responded calmly after swallowing a bite of her sandwich.
Molly felt some of her anger drain away as she stared at Ms. Clementine and remembered their earlier conversation in which she seemed to genuinely care for her son. “I was hoping to talk about the plant Jack’s been growing. He said his was the tallest but he was all upset he didn’t win a prize.”
Ms. Clementine put down her sandwich, smiled, and stood up. “Let me show you all the plants the children brought back.” She gestured toward the table next to the window. “See if you can find Jack’s”
Molly walked closer to the table and was immediately struck by how different most of the little plants looked compared to the one that had grown up in her south-facing room. Twenty-four of them had many slender leaves growing from a central stem. Only one, taller than the rest, had a tall, curly central stalk with three heart-shaped leaves attached.
“Uh, yeah, I see. Jack’s plant’s right here,” Molly said sheepishly, pointing to the one misfit plant.
“I believe that’s some type of bean plant,” Ms. Clementine said in a friendly voice. “We originally put Marigold seeds in the cups, so I was a little confused how Jack grew something different.”
Molly blushed and fumbled over her next words. “I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I knocked over his cup and had to replace it. He kept saying seed and bean interchangeably so I thought it must be some kind of bean.”
“I guess that explains it.”
“He loves that plant so much. He was sure he was going to win the prize. I hate to see him disappointed.”
Ms. Clementine returned a grin. “Kids get so caught up in the idea of a prize. The prize is simply the privilege of filling up a little jug so everyone can use it to water their own plants. Even though Jack’s plant was tallest, it was hard for me to justify him filling the jug when we were comparing beans and Marigolds.”
“I understand. Even if Jack doesn’t. Could you maybe let him fill up the jug just to water his plant?”
“I’m afraid if I did that, I’d have to let all twenty-five students trek down to the bathroom with the jug.”
Molly nodded her head and sighed. “I just need to do something. Maybe I could buy him a little prize and tell him it was from you.”
Ms. Clementine could see that Molly was determined to make her son feel better. The teacher walked to a bookshelf on the other side of the room and thumbed through a collection of paperback story books. She pulled out a much-read copy of “Jack and the Beanstalk” and handed it to Molly. “You can tell him this is from me.”
Molly smiled and laughed at the idea. She thanked Ms. Clementine for all her hard work and left the classroom feeling much better than she had when arriving.
“I have something for you,” Molly told her son, as soon as she saw him again. “Your teacher wants me to give it to you as a special prize for the plant contest. Special, because your plant is different than all the others.”
Jack leafed through the picture book’s pages.
“You probably know the story,” his mom continued. “It’s about some magic beams that grew into this giant beanstalk. Kind of like your plant.”
Jack nodded and smiled. “Let’s read it.”
“Right now?”
“Uh huh.”
Jack’s obsession with watering and measuring his plant was replaced by a love for his special book and speculating how his magic beans got into his dirt. He and his mom read the story until the flimsy cover fell off. And when the classroom Marigolds bloomed into flowers, Jack was happy that bean pods grew from his cup.
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