cranky, old man redux

This morning one of my musical/spiritual mentors - Carrie Newcomer - wrote this:

Now enters May, the bridge month, the days between the beginning of spring and arrival of summer. The first wildflowers, the trillium and hepatica, salt and peppers and Dutchman’s britches, the blue bells and celandine poppies are lifting their handkerchiefs in the wind, a tender farewell until the next muddy March. The second wave is emerging, rising up from the forest floor, the jack-in-the-pulpits, wild phlox, the morels and other mushrooms. At the bird feeder a flash of orange or red appears, a sleek scarlet tanager or Baltimore oriole, stopping in for a few days on their long journey north. The haunting song of the wood thrush has returned to the deep woods around my home. The frost date has past and it is time to plant my raised beds, to rake in compost and dream of the tomatoes that will ripen in July.

I’m not sure why I love the transitions in the natural world so much but I do. I love the liminal time when the bats head toward their roosts while the birds begin to sing their first morning songs. I love the wash of color that comes with the last rays of sun at the edge of the horizon. I love this time of year when the trees are covered with with a five O’clock shadow of barely unfurled leaves, that luminous spring green in perfect juxtaposition with the purple blooms of the redbud trees. I love the dusty smell in the air that lets me know that the summer has ended and the first days of autumn have arrived, and when the first filigrees of ice begin to form at the edge of the pond. There is beauty in the shift, expectation in the transition, a wonder in the process that make my heart ache and open. I can learn a lot from the experience of loving the changes that happen in the woods. There is wisdom in the order of natural things.

I'm with Carrie: I am energized by these transitional seasons and love how they help and challenge me to hang loose in the saddle. That was essential as this week evolved and I tried to find a way to refurbursh my ancient Fiskar Reel Push lawnmower. Our current model has  been in regular service for twelve hard years. Now that I must have the blades sharpened, guess what? No one does this type of work any more - in ALL of Berkshire County! The only gent who once sharpened reel mower blades moved South last year according to a wise old hardware store manager. What's more, push reel lawn mowers are not even sold in our neck of the woods any longer. I checked all the big box outlets as well as five independent hardware stores and none carried manual reel lawn mowers. To be sure, I could get a so-called eco-friendly electric machine with a rechargable battery - or one of a variety of gus guzzling, smoke spewing lawn mowing hogs - there's even some cut rate financing available for a mini-tractors. But nary a quiet, manually operated standard reel push model is to be found in all of Western Massachusetts. Color me cranky.

After a rigorous phone, online, and in-person search yesterday morning, I found a solitary hardware store that would sharpen my machine's blade IF I could remove it. After 45 minutes of trying to take my old friend apart, only to discover that it's constructed like a Swiss watch - intricate and complex - I threw in the towel and quit. You might say I felt modestly cranky again. Today I wanted to try sharpening the blade by hand but found that we'd lost the necessary file. And when I reassembled Old Faithful as well as I remembered, there were a few bolts gone missing forcing me to cut the most onerous parts of the yard with my weed wacker. Call it inspiration or the gift of learning a little from my countless mistakes, but I quickly ordered a new Fiskar push reel mower on line just to be safe. With none of ou local merchants showing any interest in such antiquated merchandise, once again I find myself caught in the web of Mammon. Jeff Bilbro carefully suggests that: 

Mammon is an old demon whose temptation Andy Crouch defines as “abundance without dependence.” Mammon promises to “conjur[e] up the goods and services I require and desire without entangling myself with the personalities and needs of other people.” Or, as Crouch puts it elsewhere in his book (on Wendell Berry), “what it wants, above all, is to separate power from relationship, abundance from dependence, and being from personhood.” At the heart of this temptation is the promise that our frustrations and limitations and failures have solutions and all we need to do is acquire the right technique. (see more @ https://

www.frontporchrepublic.com/2022/05/severe-mercies-and-magnanimous-despair/)

While I enjoy and often use the wonders of internet shopping, we have also made a conscious committment to buy mostly locally. Living in a small community has given me the chance to know the local merchants and develop a measure of caring for them all, too. The woman at the local package store asks me about my grandchildren, the independent car mechanic committed to keeping older vehicles safe and running suggests the most economical and safe way to move forward, the neighbor who plows our steep drive way in the winter smiles and waves when ever he drives by, the clerks at Aldis or WalMart and I talk about the challenge of keeping an open heart when so many people are exploding in fear and rage, and I often see our local politicians at the farmers' market: I know them and have developed relationships of respect with them. Their well-being is genuinely linked to mine so I feel an ethical responsibility to share my resources with them in responsible ways. I sense that Gandhi got it right when he crafted his seven deadly social sins:

Which brings me back to my feelings of spiritual and cultural crankiness: the disappearance of crafts people doing simple repairs on small machines is antithetical to the soul of thrifty New England. It once was said with glee that "we ALWAYS repair rather than buy new." I grew up in five different traditional New England small towns where it was a virtue to recycle, repair, resuse, and repurpose. My Poppa Fred made us a racing cart out of an old ironing board and the wheels from a discarded baby buggie. My Granda Nick regularly baked yeasted dinner rolls from scratch. We used to make boats and dress-up hats out of discarded newsprint. Di's family shared hand-made gifts at Christmas.  Fifty years later, however, planned obsolesence is the order of the day even in our small towns throughout New England. It's become that era bigger is better and hence my collapse into Mammon.

One of the gifts I've received while pushing my old reel mower across the front yard involves the random conversations I've had with walkers, joggers, and delivery people. They almost all stop, watch me for a moment, and then say with affection: "I didn't think anyone used those any more. Its so quiet, not like those damn electric or gas powered leaf blowers that violate our Sabbath stillness and stink up the air." I stop and smile, and eventually they smile, too and shyly add, "Thanks, man" before heading on. It takes a lot more work to use this old mower. It is equally laborious to use an old fashioned rake for the bramble and accumulated winter detritus on the grass. Given my arthritis, there are days when I can only accomplish about 45 minutes of such manual labor at a time. But I despise noise pollution and detest fouling the air. Moreover, the physical and visual aesthetics of doing all this by hand are simply too wonderful to forsake.

So, given the bountiful sun forecast for the rest of the week, it looks like I'll be ALL about renewing my acquaintance with the garden. For the time being, Brother Sun has taken up semi-permanent residency in our Berkshire hills which is a blessing NOT to be taken for granted. We got the large plants back out on the deck along with assorted herbs. Tomorrow I'll build two new raised garden beds, add fertilizing from our compost, and add more organic top soil. Saturday we'll visit a few native plant nurseries to add a few new shrubs and seedlings to the place and get some pumpkin and herb seedlings. This year we're going to revive the three sisters of the First Nations people - corn, beans, and pumpkins - in a dedicated raised bed. Tomatoes will have reign over their own raised bed with potatoes taking up a third. Cukes and assorted squash will fill the fourth with new milkweed along the scrub ling with a ton of wildflowers in addition to the chard, lettuce, peas, and various green leafy plants closer to the house.

It is our hope to keep returning our small patch of creation back to its native origins with flowers and plants that have been long neglected but essential to our collective well-being. As we sit out on the deck at breakfast to soak up the trees and birds of the wetlands, I am reminded of what Wendell Berry said when asked what can we do to reclaim community:

What can we do? We can take Gary Snyder’s good advice: “Stop somewhere.” He meant stop and stay and deal with the consequences. We can teach ourselves to think as community members rather than as individuals in competition with all other individuals. We can work, shop, eat, and amuse ourselves as close to home as possible. We can, on our own or with like-minded people, become mindful of all that we have in our places that is worth keeping, and of the best ways of keeping those things. And, to quote Gary Snyder again, we can

stay together

learn the flowers

go light

Today, I am a joyful, old crank - unfit for the status quo - and unwilling to let my mind be squeezed into the mold of the lowest common denominator (as St. Paul put it.) I'll deal with a scruffy lawn until our new reel mower arrives. I'll keep on playing and learning in the dirt as we tend to our gardens and land. The Reverend Pamela Dolan put it like this in her open-hearted and wise little book, Contemplative Gardening: 

There is so much beauty and wonder in scenery that would have once struck me as ordinary and forgetable. This might be the greatest gift that gardening bestows: the ability to see the world in a new way and fall in love with creation all over again.