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Watercolor: Wyona Bates
m...the cabin where Pilling children and grandchildren spent their summers ... |
Now I think of them as women’s tools and can hardly wait to pick them up in the spring. I love to turn over the earth, examine the long roots of a weed that I have displaced, go through my patch of curly thyme, pulling out stray grass there. I like doing that.
Last summer my brother came to my cabin, shovel, rake, hoe and landscaping fabric, and made a small pool at the bottom of a stream, just where the water runs under the road.
That day I can still see our combined sets of grandchildren, bare-foot, splashing through the water, a six year old lying across a large rock in the stream, reading a book, others playing tag or balancing their arms as they made their way across the dam structure for the small pool of water, hoping both to and not to fall off.
This is the same place where a bobcat cleaned out underbrush many years ago, and we planted grass. Glen told me that the minute the bob cat left we had to rake and pull stones out of the earth until it was smooth enough to plant grass.
My cabin is built on a gravel pile. To pull up one rock is only to release another to take its place. At any rate, we only had a day to do that before the sun dried out the ground and it would be to hard to smooth out. I enlisted everyone’s help. We work
ed all day. We only took breaks to drink water.
Richard was a teen by then.
When he was a mature adult, he told me that is the day he hated me the most of his growing up years.
It was a full day of work with a shovel, rake and hoe.
No release for childhood pleasures for him.
I lost a child’s love.
Still, I love my shovel, rake and hoe.
Arta
I love those tools now because they generally mean I am outside working in my yard or garden. A place I love to be. Yes, our relationships with tools change as we grow and age. As an adult I can appreciate that the right tool for a job can make the job so much more enjoyable.
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