I love my garden tools. But there is one I love more than all the rest – my beautiful, multi-functional, never tarnishing, never deteriorating, never diminishing six-in-one hand-trowel.
I love, love, love it. And I’ve had it for years and years and years. So you’ll understand my alarm, my despair, my devastation when I stepped out into the garden this morning and found it missing.
“Oh no, no, no! Where are you my precious?” I said. And I immediately began searching and searching for it, here, there and everywhere.
It has a sturdy blue plastic handle, curved in all the right places to make it a pleasure to grip and wield.
It doesn’t have a name. There’s no brand name on the handle, just the words “patent pending”, so I guess mine must have been a prototype.
I call it the six-in-one because it has at least six useful functions.
The handle has a flat end, perfect for knocking in stakes (small stakes) or tapping in plant markers.
It has a six-inch stainless steel blade with ragged edge on one side for ripping open soil, fertilizer or compost bags, and a slicing knife-edge on the other side for cutting twigs or slicing stems or hacking at roots.
At the tip, it has a lovely fork feature, perfect for winkling up weeds and especially useful for uprooting tricky, stubborn weed likes dandelions and buttercup.
And then it has a trowel-like curved stainless steel centre with inches marked off to make it easy to check on the depth of planting. (Actually, I don’t use this feature at all, but I’m glad it’s there.)
When I realized this tool was missing, the smile went from my face. I felt annoyed that I had been so careless. And I felt sad that our gardening days together were over.
I began searching. Feverishly. I looked everywhere. In the solarium, where I keep all of my hand tools. Not there.
I looked under the deck, where all the spades and rakes and wheelbarrows are kept. Not there.
I looked in the bins I use to hold soil when digging or to carry soil from one spot to another. Not there.
I walked the entire garden – front, back, sides, back, front, sides – twice, three times. I looked deep under shrubs and parted the leaves of emerging perennials and lifted the leafy stems of daffodils and tulips.
When did I last use it, I thought. Ah yes, digging up buttercup. I raced to the spot where I was doing this and looked and looked. No sign.
Then it hit me. I probably put it in the bin with the buttercup weeds and emptied it with all the weeds into the big municipal green waste recycling bin.
Oh no, I thought, my favourite tool is gone to where so many of my trowels have gone before, to the great garbage dump in the sky . . . well, okay, to the municipal dump at Still Creek, but I digress.
My face was full of sadness and regret. Loraine came out. ‘
What’s wrong, “ she asked. And I heard Paul Simon’s song Run That Body Down and the way he sings the line, “What’s wrong sweet boy, what’s wrong?”
“I lost my favourite garden tool, the six-in-one with the blue handle.” I said.
Ah well, Loraine said, and went back inside.
I searched one last time, looking in all the same places, only more thoroughly and also including the utility room, where I keep twine and gloves and stuff like that, and in the pockets of all my gardening jackets. Nothing.
Forlornly, I went back to gardening and got on with doing what I had to do – prune and clip, weed and sweep, tidy and rake, and it was all done with the weight of disappointment and regret.
Later, as I was kicking off my boots and taking off my coat, what did I spot propped up by the back door – oh joy to the world, my wonderful, blue six-in-one tool. But how could it be? How did it suddenly appear there in a place where I had looked again and again.
I ran with it to show Loraine.
You found it! Thank you, I exclaimed.
Not me, she said. I didn’t put it there. Must have been there all the time.
Impossible, I said.
Then it came to me, yes, it’s a gardening miracle. And I looked up to the sky and yes, the clouds did indeed have a silver lining and there were sunbeams bursting from the edges.
And I began to sing. From Fiddler on the Roof. Wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles. The tailor’s song. And I was dancing a bit, too.
And when I had finished that, I sang a few lines from Scarlet Ribbons, you know the old song about the ribbon that suddenly appears overnight when all the stores are closed and shuttered.
If I live to be 100, I will never know from where . . . came that lovely six-in-one tool, six-in-one tool for me to use, I sang.
Then I returned indoors, happy, reconciled, renewed and still holding the wonderful lost-but-now-found six-in-one tool.
It is beside me here now as I type this. I have made a promise: I will never lose you again. You are just too important, too precious.
And so here endeth another fulfilling and totally magical day in my life as a gardener.
swhysall@hotmail.com
you are too funny!
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