“Most problems are universal. A few however ... are unique. Which is why, when I came upon my broken pitchfork behind a ladder in the garage, I was so happy to see it. I could tell by it’s odd posture, that it had fallen apart & been put back together wrong. How the tines curve in relation to the arc of the handle, is a subtle affair. In the heat of a summer’s day, the fork’s failures had rankled & flustered, often rendering the repair opposite what God intended, I knew that now. And yet, uplifted by the sight of it, its rakish indifference to where it had been thrown in lieu of being trashed, I began to make plans. Discarded, bent, ugly in fact, it was clear that its true utility was about to emerge. Don’t ask me how I tuned in to this channel; dreams, goosebumps, palpitations, dogged exhaustion: all may have played a part. I pulled it from hiding and eagerly stuck it into a pile of frozen snow in front of the garage, where I was sure to fall over it or hit it with the truck. This is the dance of winter, I thought. One minute dodging the sudden release of slush off the metal roof, the next huddled under covers, eyes wide open, as the house literally shakes. That last storm must have been the one. Traipsing up to the yurt on a sunnier day to shovel, I decided to shovel out the outhouse, as well. Which sounds bad, but as outhouse technology has moved forward, we find a sheetrock bucket in place of the proverbial “hole”. Which left me to clearing only the path, the outhouse deck, and any snow that had made its way inside the artisanal structure, and say, powdered the mint green seat, or plastic container housing two rolls of toilet paper. This went as planned, until, upon further inspection, I made the shocking discovery that my 44 gallon trash barrel full of dry peat moss had been breached. Call me inattentive, I guess; I’d forgotten to put a brick on top of it, and you can bet those 50-70 mph winds took that flimsy piece of hateful plastic off to a location we might consider exotic. Such nights empty the skies of rain, then freeze hard. Into a kind of trash barrel-shaped, impenetrable iceberg. Which a decommissioned pitch-fork might be called back into active duty to dispatch, since it’s still in the garage. Yes, my brilliant instincts astound mostly just myself. To have clung to imperfection, put up with the annoyance year after year, felt frustrated with my own inability to just toss it. A broken tool, is a job not yet done. I’ll take it as a signal from the universe, that, for my birthday, friends gave me a grinder to sharpen my tools. It helps to know that I still have tools, worth sharpening.”
