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.

Bring Back the Wooden Picnic Table!

At Dickey Bub's a patient man named Lowell looked at the long and rusty 1/4-inch-wide wood screw in my outstretched palm and said, "Sure I'll find it for you," and we walked all the way to the rear of the store, where I had never been, and searched little segmented drawers full of gleaming wood screws, and finally he said there wasn't a correctly sized wood screw with a rounded top but I could use a flat-top and screw it in with pliers. I asked for a matching nut, because I'd seen some screws with nuts in the picnic table, and Lowell did not laugh at me, and gave me matching washers. They're sold by weight. I got four to fix my picnic table. The little bag of wood screws cost me 89 cents. I thought this was marvelous.

This old picnic table predates my living here. There's one that stays protected on my screened porch, but this one has always stayed outdoors getting shabbier, wobblier, wetter, more termite-eaten and pecked at over 10 years, and I tugged it across the lane last year and it nearly fell apart, and in 2011 either I fix it or have no picnic table, or have to buy a horrid new plastic one. Starting out so ignorant I barely knew a wood screw from a sheet-metal screw, I replaced its ancient iron nails with shiny new wood screws, C-clamped its one splitting leg, reinforced its wiggly support beam (is it called a joist?) with one of the big new wood screws, drove some finishing nails in from the top, and it aint a neat job but it's sturdy now and has a future. Ends of its legs are rotted and uneven, and I don't know how to fix that, but it'll hold Midwestern picnic food, and I was smart enough and strong enough to have stored its matching benches in the garage every winter so they're just fine, so y'all come. It's under the twin oaks near the fire bowl now.

My Machete

Demetrius the Gardener died almost two years ago now, and left in my garage his machete, his favorite and most savage tool, which I never touched until today because I was afraid of its size, weight, and wickedly sharp double-edged head. It's 54 inches tall. I'm 62 inches tall. He also left me all the heavy outdoor work he used to do.

My winter project is clearing two years' worth of weeds, briars, fallen branches and Japanese honeysuckle around my twin oaks, with an eye toward a hammock or treehouse between them someday, and I've toiled along with a weed whip and then brushcutters, but in places the brush (you can see some of it behind my blue jacket there) made barriers so dense I couldn't cut through them except with an axe -- or the machete. As usual when I'm reluctant I told myself, "Ain't nobody gonna do it FOR you," and got to work and learned it. The concave side was good for hacking down piles and layers, six feet tall, of dry fallen branches; the convex side for pulverizing them.

While I worked I kept peeling off clothing and wondered why I dreaded winter when it wasn't that bad at all. And every now and then I rested, because I'm older now, and saw that the machete was really a handsome tool. And when I got tired I took off my work gloves and told myself, "Put the machete away now; you have no business using such a thing when you're tired," congratulating myself on my wisdom, except I told myself, "Just a few more minutes" and that's when I cut and scraped my hand -- not on the machete, but on a dry branch sticking up. I said, "Okay, I get it; that was a warning," and put the machete away for the day.

Times of the Signs, Part 3

Nothing heartens me like the sign "Live Bait," and the Eureka Feed Station has that sign up all year. Another sign too, seasonal, mentions Christmas; the only one like it in town! Divine purchases there include birdseed by the sack, bales of straw, cases of suet, deerskin leather work gloves (8 years and grubby-lookin but still good!), mousetraps and poison, salt blocks, tools & fishing license. Run by a father and son. Used to be closed on Sunday and Monday also. One time Demetrius left his wallet on the counter on a Saturday and it was in the same place when he returned on Tuesday. The Feed Station now, somewhat reluctantly, has Sunday hours. Posted on the door:

Sunday:
8:30-10 Church
Open 11 a.m. - 3 p.m.

Cut Hit Bit Shiver Sweat

Stepped on a rake once. The handle up and hit me in the face. Thank God no one saw me. I was 48 years old.

Anyone moving to the country in mid-life has to take the motto "Live and learn." You're going to get cut, scraped, sweaty, bitten. Ants will float in your coffee. I found a wasp drowned and ambered in my jar of honey. You'll slip and fall and be stupid. Live and learn.

A couple days after a flood I stepped up on what seemed like solid-packed creekside debris and fell through it up to my hips.

Stepped in quicksand (silica makes top-notch quicksand). It was like cookie dough and I couldn’t fix it to get one leg out so I could pull out the other one.

On a slick riverbank, fell backward into a bed of stinging nettle. Didn’t know what it was. Eight seconds later I figured it out.

Make sure guests don't park beneath the tree when the hickory nuts are dropping.

Clapped a fat huge four-inch tomato hornworm between two bricks. Thought I was being clever. It squirted 360 degrees all over creation including onto my glasses and mouth.

Oh, it don’t matter if that machete is a little too weighty for me and has a dull blade. . . .

Live here and learn.

Celebrating Steve the Handyman

On this Labor Day: on Friday I photographed Steve the handyman and his tools when he came by to install a new window in the Divine cabin. I put it here to remind myself that "labor" isn't a synonym for "people overseas," and also to honor all labor, even mine, and its contribution to prosperity, health, and contentment. Labor these days seems to be taken for granted -- why, we hardly use the very word anymore unless we're talkin about babies. Let's change that right now.

Dickey Bub Farm & Home

Birdseed and suet is one-third cheaper at Dickey Bub's, a medium-large hardware store with three locations: Union, Potosi, and Eureka, MO. They sell the Dickey brand of work clothes for men and women, along with tools, seeds, rock salt, John Deere riding mowers & that. When they opened I was scared to go in there. It was too "man." My haircutter tole me she was almost brave enough to go in there until she heard their sound system blasting a song about tequila.

Several score of fat and lazy wild birds depend on me for seed and suet, and needing a way to cut the cost, I finally sidled into the Dickey Bub's, and wandered in a daze (what IS that metal thing?) until I found the pallets of 35-lb. bags of Tru-Value mixed birdseed. I was used to backing my car up to a loading dock and they'd put the bags in the trunk for me. But at the Dickey Bub's there were no clerks to be seen, nor loading docks, nor shopping carts -- men don't use em, I guess --and I had to hoist the sack over my shoulder and carry it if I dint want to look like a helpless female gettin weak and whiny in her change of life.

It's got easier to go in there and easier to carry the bags, and I am so pleased with myself. Plus, the birds and I both eat better. Nowhere else around here sells 100 percent wool socks, which stay warm when they're wet, a necessity: it's not only men who get shin-deep in creeks or muck and that, and then have a ways to go to get home.