Honoring the past while digging in to the future
Just a few weeks back, I waxed poetic about the wheelbarrow I’d inherited from my father-in-law Jovach. He’d handed off the one-wheeler along with some other key gardening implements just before he passed away several years ago.
I’d quickly chucked my own rusted and ratty big-box-bought wheelbarrow in favor of the old man’s industrial-strength unit by trying to turn it into one of those cutesy landscaping features where a carpet of flowers appears to spill out of the tipped tub. The effort ended up looking a lot more like a garbage truck reject than lawn art, so much so the guy who patrols our neighborhood on trash night looking for scrap steel hoisted the heap into the back of his pickup and carried it off to be melted down.
The wheelbarrow that remained had been guaranteed to last a lifetime by old Jovach, and it was well on its way to doing so when I’d snapped a wooden handle on the very first load of mulch this season. Subsequently, I spent most of a sunny Sunday afternoon running back and forth to the hardware store to retrofit the beast with all-steel handles. Upon completion of the repair, I had, in true “unsinkable Titanic” fashion, declared it “fit to last an entire additional lifetime” — a boast that proved wholly accurate so long as the lifetime was that of a fruit fly.
On my second load of the season, Jovach’s certified, bona fide “never flat” tire ripped itself from a rusted-out rim, and I once again found myself beached in mid-work. By the time I was done with this additional little makeover, rescuing Jovach’s wheelbarrow had cost me a full day’s worth of honey-do time and somewhere in the vicinity of $150 — a high price to pay for a less-than-collector-quality lawn implement.
On the brighter side, the mess made for some great storytelling and also, unbeknownst to me, worked to set the perfect stage for my Father’s Day gift from my son-in-law Andrew.
In prefacing his presentation, Andrew reminded me of how we’d split the head right off the handle of a garden shovel last summer while working to build a fence around the kids’ backyard. I’d lamented the loss of “Jovach’s prized garden spade” during that whole episode, and Andrew took note, stealthily spiriting the scarred scooper away to effectively render it out of sight and out of mind as the work proceeded onward.
The shovel repair was well underway and set for a Father’s Day rollout at the same time I ran into my back-to-back wheelbarrow wipeouts. It was all Andrew, Charlotte and the kids could do to keep from telling me they too had gone the distance to honor Jovach’s gardening tradition by fixing his old spade while I was doing the very same thing by stitching his “bulletproof” wheelbarrow back together.
The kids presented me with the freshly hickory-handled and fully reconditioned “Jovach Spade” on Father’s Day evening. Somewhere, a curl of pipe smoke rose contentedly into the sky.
Kristin and John Lorson would love to hear from you. Write Drawing Laughter, P.O. Box 170, Fredericksburg, OH 44627, or email John at jlorson@alonovus.com.