Long Lost

Our sign says "No Turnaround" but trucks can't read, and when backing up inch by inch to try to turn around, their tires fump down off the gravel and churn up a track of mud maybe three inches deep. In spring especially. Today while walking the trash can back up the incline I saw something odd in the latest tire track, stopped, recognized it.

I had splurged on a five-piece set of Henckels scissors around 2002, and by 2007 or 2009 had worn out its kitchen shears and flower shears and the other, and lost two including the pair I favored for harvesting herbs. Never again had a set that elegant. It's 10 years later and I notice handles?!?!? in the wave of mud.

Pull 'em out. The herb scissors. I'll be darned. The pivot is dark with rust and corroded, looks like a raisin, but the blades are still keen. Rinsed it, and scrubbed away some of the rust with baking soda. Gave it a little lubricant. Maybe I can replace the pivot.

I'm amazed. Just amazed. Durability.

Making the Cut

I used to spend hours and days outside with these tools saving the property from invasive cedars and Japanese honeysuckle vines, and after about seven years the clippers and weed whip, dulled and unusable, sat in the garage until I realized a while ago, "I can now pay to sharpen these," and, to be honest with you, also thought, "When the apocalypse comes, any day now, I will wish I had sharpened these tools" to cut a clearing in the underbrush and clip and trim branches to build my lean-to, and so on.

Nobody else, I was sure, ever let their tools get so dull. Embarrassed to bring them to the sharpener, I prepared a fib -- "I bought these at a garage sale" -- in case the sharpener said, "Whee doggie. I've never in my life seen garden tools in such a deplorable condition." I wasn't sure whether the weed whip, my favorite, with its double-edged and serrated blade, could even be honed. I never knew anyone who cleaned or sharpened garden tools; Demetrius left his crusted with clay and soil. Also needing treatment were two lopping shears and a very old pair of hedge shears with wooden handles. The hedge shears were already here, rusted stiff, blades blackened with time and handles sticky with dust, when I moved in long ago. I wondered whether they could be salvaged. In the garage when I moved here was also a scythe, an actual scythe, but I think it's gone.

The sharpener sharpened and spiffed up all four and covered the freshly honed edges with paper, a courtesy unexpected and appreciated. Here they are back home, and out I go because I like cold weather for doing the heavy work of cutting.

Draw a Line Through His Name

Nearly six years Demetrius has been gone. He is most present in the garage, in his gardening tools. His massive old wheelbarrow I gave to the first person who could move it. In the garage he left rolls of plastic, and vinyl-coated concrete discs and 2x4s, and two fishing reels still in their packaging. (Fishing is about hope.) When dragging 50 pounds of rock salt or oilseed, I sometimes ask him aloud, "Why did you leave me?," and walking where we used to walk, I say, "Where are you? Are you okay?" I thank him for the ramp he built it from particle board, allowing me easily to roll the portable dishwasher into the kitchen; I won't be able to replace it if it breaks. I tell him, "I remember the retired lamplighter" he knew when he was a boy, because that lamplighter will live as long as we remember him, and "I'll never forget Polka the Giraffe," a character in a children's book he was writing but didn't finish. He perfected one short story, about a farm laborer, I'm still sending to literary magazines. In his final months he dreamed that the closet door opened onto a polar landscape with warm furs and a sled and sled dogs waiting for him. (He liked biographies and stories about polar explorers.) In January he rode Amtrak to the Rocky Mountains, bedridden all the while because he'd forgotten about high altitudes. He returned skeletal, angry at everyone, and lived 12 more days, dying less than 5 miles from where he was born.

Seed catalogs still arrive with his name on them, as do letters and newsletters from the radical organizations he so much wanted to be a part of. I write on them "Return to Sender," draw a line through his name, and write "Deceased Feb. '09."