Farewell to a Fond Friend

MY LITTLE TILLER is out by the trash. Just shy of its 24^th year in service, it finally exhausted itself. It cannot be coaxed back to tear its way even one more time through my rocky garden. The kind man who picked up my garden tiller from time to time to service it and then return it to my garage for a small fee, used a hushed tone giving me the news that he and I and it were done in our long time together. Previously, he had marveled over it. Me too, though for different reasons.

The small engine repair guy always told me that the tiny tiller was a wonder of engineering. This was not one of the bruising Garden Way machines, but instead a  slender two-stroke device, under 20 pounds, brilliantly designed by Mantis, and from its first days in my life it established itself as the single best marital aid money can buy.

A gift from my husband, it was actually a pre-marital surprise given for my birthday just months before our wedding. Better than a bracelet, this one tool provided us more together time than any lingerie ever yielded.

You’d understand if you saw the first house we owned. Sad does not cover it. Tumble-down does not aptly describe it. That only two young people in love could have inhabited it does cover it, and that we left it with nine separate garden plots where none had been before illustrates the access my tiller gave me to the ground I first walked as a new bride. Thousands of daffodil bulbs, three dozen rose bushes, an entire summer devoted to moving daylilies into massive roadside trenches, as well as the round Parisian carrots plucked from the snowy loam on Christmas morning are only a few of the joys that tiller allowed at that first home.

At our second house we broke new ground again, this time clearing yards of brambles and brush and making way for garden named Graceland after the infant who soon strolled through the leveled, tamed plot, plucking edible flowers from their stems and waving a dimpled palm through the catmint.

By the third move, we were old hands at churning the land, this time attaching a 45 by 45 foot garden to the back of a home and ringing it with a seven-foot deer fence. Ah, suburbia. The tiller fit right in, it’s low hum alerting nearly no one to the early morning gardening we’d perform before the child awoke.

The hundred or so sunflowers from this year’s garden now bow their heads, marking the end of the season. Merely spent, they are exhausted and plucked clean by the birds, though nodding as they are, they seem also to stand like an honor guard, bidding our mutual friend farewell.