A Good Hoe

A tool I picked up from my dad when I was home is the garden hoe pictured above.

I've praised another tool on this blog before when I talked about the glory of the HoeDag last year.

But this hoe is different. It was free. My dad used it. And it's old. Perhaps it's even an antique?

It wasn't originally Virg's though. He told me he picked it up at a garage sale years ago.

As you can notice from the picture above, it's bowed a little bit in the middle and very long. When I stand it upright, the top of it goes to the tip of my nose. Now I'm not a tall guy, but still, you don't have to stoop over at all when using this fine tool. And it's longer than the hoe I bought a couple of years ago.

But the marks of my dad on this tool. Using his bench grinder, which is also in my garage, he sharpened the blade for efficiency. Unwanted sprouts in my garden, meet your destroyer.

I don't know if this feature of the hoe was standard in the factory, but there's a hollowed out piece of wood on the top of the hoe for your back hand as you work, an add-on that has character.

This old tool reminds me of the famous essay by Wendell Berry, a guy who should win the Nobel Prize in Literature by the way. It's called "A Good Scythe." 

In the essay, Berry recounts how at one time he bought a power scythe for working on his land, and then he went back to using an old-fashioned one for a number of reasons. Toward the end of the essay after he has provided a bulleted list of ten reasons why the old technology is better than the new, he provides two additional reasons: 

1. "I always work with the pleasure that one invariably gets from using a good tool. And because it is not motor-driven and is quiet and odorless, the hand scythe allows you to appreciate your surroundings as you work."
2. "The other difference is between kinds of weariness. Using the hand scythe causes the simple bodily weariness that comes with exertion. This is a kind of weariness that, when not extreme, can be one pleasure of work. The power scythe, on the other hand, adds to that weariness of exertion the unpleasant weariness of strain."

He calls his experience and reflection on using both types of scythes as a "parable" because "[t]he power scythe--and it is far from being an isolated or unusual example--is not a labor-saver or a short cut. It is a labor-maker (you have to work to pay for it as well as to use it) and a 'longcut.' Apologists for such expensive technological solutions love to say that 'you can't turn back the clock.' But when it makes perfect sense to do so, as the case of a good old-fashioned scythe, of course you can!"

So there's pleasure in a good tool just as there's pleasure in eating well from produce you've grown.