(NOT) ONLY IN ITALY? GARDEN TOOLS AND GRIEF (Part two)

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While appearing to write about garden tools, I’m reminded of a post I wrote years ago: 


REVIVAL (OR, HOW TO MOW LIKE THE QUEEN!) 


Although I was not grieving the loss of a dear one at the time, I think I was anticipating the losses to come. As I re-read this piece, I’m struck by how it is speaking to me now, eight years later when I have lost an old friend. I see that Queen Elizabeth who is featured in this old piece is now well into her ninety-fifth year and is as wrinkle free as my nonagenarian mom was when she died as her ninety-fourth birthday approached. 

 

The last lines of my piece feel prescient: 

When you are the Queen, you can probably carry on longer. Impermanence reigns more easily further down the line.

 

Even so, there are limits.

The Buddhists have got it right:

Remove attachment. 

Everything is going to change.

 

But memory? 

Maybe not.

*

Update with my scary new tool, a 2021 birthday gift from my husband. 

My Finnish friend who is one of the best gardeners I know swears by this tool: “I do everything with it. It’s all I need.“

*

My new tool, a Japanese invention known as a hori-hori, is wonderfully international: recommended by a Finn, made in China, and given to me in Slovenia. Further, for how to use it, I just watched a 3-minute video by a Brit. 


https://youtu.be/P-yCM0iHpyM


I took my hori-hori on its maiden voyage in Italy, and I’m really impressed. My industrial-strength weeds are in for it now!

 

 


I wonder what Farmer G would have thought of my new tool. I’m thinking that it would have amused him. So what if those Japanese have been using it for centuries? It’s no match for a Zappa in the hands of a Master.

 



Here he is, Il Professore del arte della Zappa, as photographed years ago by his granddaughter, making his own Zappa.




A loose translation of granddaughter Veronica's label is "still doing things in the tried-and-true old ways even in the modern age."




 

   

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