“It was an old captain’s chair; its brown canvas mellowed by age and it ripped when he sat down, half ejecting him onto the porch floor. “Burn it”, he said, and I did, today, decidedly not in the mood to put another fatally broken object into storage. Such a repair would have been unlikely, falling well behind the hand-crafted pottery lamps with bad cords, battery powered mower cogs, and wobbly chess table. In my local travels, I see relatives of these items, in everyone’s outbuildings: vying for space, tipping into the moisture laden dirt, filling sheds with their visual flotsam, and the smells of the unused. “Maybe someday”, in a more perfect world, we mentally chant, with a twinge of pain in our hearts, for what we’ll never get to but can’t let go of. On the flip side, are things that are supposed to be there, but are not. He said he remembered a hose that might be in the tractor shed, & surely, we needed the extra length of it. I made my way, stepping high over the brush hog, almost knocking over a pail with extra grass seed I’d put on top what was left of a bale of straw. Past tools used on more ambitious occasions, if at all, but laudable for the intention that had once gripped its owner. Thinking mostly that I already knew it wouldn’t be there. I must do it ten times a day, anyway, circling myself like a dog keen on lying down, but dowsing, using extra rotations, just to be sure of the spot. Eventually something is found, just maybe not what you were looking for. Whole nations have begun, on less. So the question of why we chit chat so much about the weather, comes to this quick realization: living in uncertainly, malleable scapegoats of any stripe, become a touchstone we rely on. “It was so hot that day, I couldn’t think or move”. Or the reverse: “When it starts to cool down, all of a sudden I have so much more energy! “. And all the ingenuity of the human species comes running back in, & all the lost hoses of the world wind themselves back into our hungry arms. With the promise of water, and life and from that, even love. We’d pulled hard that day, to do an aesthetic maneuver in the shade garden, that involved digging, and hauling and soaking roots and digging, some more. It was a scorcher, but we figured out how to rig the hoses, just right. It takes humor, I guess, and a buoyancy that can only come with experience, which tells you it’ll get done right, after some awkward contortions. And the satisfaction is in the work, that looks incredibly disorganized, to anyone watching, if they were to, when you were in the throes of your most creative moments. The many circles you’ve gone round & round, sort of clueless, the embarrassments you’ve suffered due to no fault of your own, the breakdowns of innocence you’ve coped with, just to stay alive. Well, now, as far as hoses are concerned, you’re in the money. One went missing, one was imaginary, while another magically appeared, to save the day. Watch your spirit as it floats on the spray, on the fresh, cold, well water of Vermont, as the earth responds to your care and to the native shrubbery of your own, invincible dedication.”
