In an effort to amuse the puppy and stop her from barking at mourners milling about at my father-in-law’s wake I take my new fork into the garden to dig in the borders and try to remove all traces of the creeping cinquefoil.
The puppy sits on the steps and watches, occasionally picking up a scrap of rotten wood in her mouth and chewing it into small pieces that she leaves strewn across the grass.
I’ve only managed to work my way along a 6 foot stretch of the bed before I notice one of the prongs on my brand new fork bent right out of shape.
“Don’t they make anything to last anymore?” I say to the puppy who is now searching for a long-lost ball under the old rose bush.
My mother’s garden fork is pushed into the ground next to a euphorbia where I inadvertently left it over the winter. Its wooden handle is rotting now but all of its prongs are perfectly aligned even though it must be more than sixty years old.
When did everything start over-promising and under-delivering? Are “Wagon Wheels” really smaller these days than they were when I was a kid or has my increase in size made them look measly? The actual answer is less important than the nagging feeling that I’m being constantly duped.
As I’m breaking clumps of heavy earth with my wonky fork I’m trying to work out how I’m going to package it to send it back for a refund.
In the newly dug over border, I find the remains of a plastic clothes peg, one of a set I bought when the wooden ones I prefer showed a distinct inability to do the only job for which they were intended when a few heavy gusts of wind blew my washing off the line into next doors daffodils.
The plastic ones, it turns out, weaken and become brittle in the sun, snap, and then fly across the garden ending up in the flower beds.
Trying to improve things with purchases that are worse than what you already have is similar to the way in which we underestimate our ability to deal with things we believe we can’t handle.
Whenever you’re stressed, anxious, or depressed and you give yourself an option to avoid doing whatever it is that you need to or have committed to do you’ll invariably take it and feel bad about yourself as a consequence thus perpetuating the state from which you are trying to escape.
Conversely, when bad things happen that are completely beyond your control and come out of nowhere you will consistently find a way of getting through things you would have sworn will flatten you.
I hang out the washing with the wooden pegs, using three instead of two, then I reinforce the handle of my mother’s old digging fork with a piece of new wood and get back to work pulling out the creepers.
For such a small and delicate-looking plant the roots are stronger and more tenacious than you’d think, but then, I remind myself, so am I.
Leave a Reply