Illustration by Victoria Borges
The pear tree snapped in August. It wasn’t brought down by a storm, but by the weight of vines that had crept into the crown, several summers’ worth of porcelainberry and Smilax. My husband and his father sliced up the trunk with the chainsaw. As I dragged away the branches, I found, leaning against the fence and half-concealed by honeysuckle, my favorite Kobalt shovel. It had rusted.
Then I yanked at the remaining vines smothering the strawberry patch. Under the tangle was a vigorous tomato I had not planted, hung with red and rotting fruit.
This is what I do: I leave things. I leave them until it’s too late.
I left the squirrel’s nest under the upstairs air conditioner, even though she scratched and chittered and sometimes shrieked like a woman. Now the squirrel is gone, and so is the windowsill. Gnawed through.
I left the spiders’ webs on the screened porch, because I didn’t want to interrupt their industry. By September, every corner was shrouded in silk.
My particular sin is leaving things out in the rain: The red-handled Felco pruners my parents gave me for my birthday. The bicycles. The cats. The lawnmower, once. (It broke.)
The only things I’m careful with are things people lend me. Even so, you’ll see me dashing through the first drops of a thunderstorm to retrieve the neighbor’s bow saw from the grass.
I used to think this habit, of leaving things to rot and rust, was harmless. Benign, even. Didn’t it demonstrate a healthy detachment from material things?
I’ve changed my mind. Mine is the worst kind of consumerism: I buy things only to destroy them. In the shed are dozens of quarts of white and black paint — gloss, semigloss, matte. I never remember what I have, and chances are the paint has dried in the long years of waiting, so I buy more. I have two loppers, both rusted from the rain. I own a dozen cheap Chinese caulk guns.
I’m not Miss Havisham. I prefer things to be tidy. The problem, I think, is this: In my mind, I’m never done. I leaned the Kobalt shovel against the fence as the sun was sinking, because I intended to finish digging the next day. I never did. Even now, my trowel lies half-buried in the vegetable garden, waiting for me to return in the spring.
But this isn’t much of an excuse. How hard is it to put things away? To set things to rights, before it’s too late?
My father-in-law, maritime artist John Barber, is one of the most conscientious people I know. His tools are shining, his accessories labeled, his cords coiled. If anything goes missing, that’s because it has vanished into the vortex of our shed, there to rest in the company of caulk guns.
So I asked him: How’d he learn to take care of things?
His answer: He sold his sailboat and bought a trawler.
A sailboat has sails and a motor, you see. The trawler only has a diesel engine. If that sputters out at sea, he’s stranded. So he read the thick owner’s manual, not once but three times through, until it began to make sense. He learned to keep everything oiled and in order.
It’s also a matter of pride. “At any given marina, you’re going to find people who don’t keep their stuff in order,” he told me. “And they’re really ridiculed. … You can tell the pros from the wannabes. And the people who don’t even wanna be.”
“Like me,” I said.
He didn’t deny it. But he gave me hope.
I’ve started to think of my Cape Cod as a boat. If I lived in a little trawler out at sea, floating far from Home Depot, what would I do then?
I’d patch the leaks. I’d sharpen my blades. I’d jettison the junk. And I damn well wouldn’t leave my shovel out in the rain.
