LOST

Long time member and experienced gardener S. A. has been unable to locate her trowel which may have been left or loaned out, earlier in the season. It is a family heirloom she dearly misses. If you find/have it, she would be grateful if it could be returned. It looks similar to the one below. The blade is silver metal, the handle wood. The ferrule covering the base of the handle is loose and tinkles when you use it. If found, please reply to this. Thank You!   [JDIG Executive Committee]After noticing this plea in the communal garden’s newsletter, a surge of deep identification bled through my handle since (as it happens) my own (blotched, bent) ferrule is loose; has been tinkling at all the wrong times. It’s so slack (do I dare admit it?) there are moments when I think I’ll split in two allowing my curved scoop to drop willy-nilly. Another point: At this late point in life, we ‘heirlooms’ hardly maintain the wherewithal anymore to scrape caked loam away from our alloy. More accumulates … mud everlasting. … mud unbecoming … mud hardening over geological time. Point taken, in Miami too, see below:

… a worker, and Justice who had practiced his childhood piano
on one of Miami’s old streets

could recall a sunburned man with a bucket of masonry trowels
who had walked by the porch window of his piano teacher

one summer at the end of a lesson hour, his red hair
stiffened by mortar.

[from “Poem/Old Miami” by Kevin Cantwell, 2017]

What kind of gardener steals a trowel, especially an older model (one of us) that tinkles nervously? What kind of gardener misplaces or replaces or mislays or buries or otherwise misappropriates? As it happens, just now, a spider web has attached itself to my scoop leaving me at a loss as to whether to anguish or languish in the event that a firm fist pulls asunder what God has joined together.